just got a amd 3200+ but it says its a 2.0ghz processor. whats wrong?

so its a 2.0 processor?

It was originally a marketing attempt to let people know that slower clocked AMD chips performed on par with faster Intel ones in the P4 days, though the system is pretty much useless now as a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo will eat a 2Ghz Pentium 4 alive and even crush a 2Ghz AMD dual-core.

They're already sliding more into chip models than speed ratings, since it's easier to trick consumers. Hey, it's worked in the video card market for years.

Initially (with the Athlon XP), the PR# meant the relative performance to a 1GHz T-bird Athlon. e.g. an XP 2400+ would perform 2.4x better than a 1GHz Athlon.

It just so happened that this number worked fairly well when comparing to the intel P4 clock speeds. e.g. An A64 3200+ would perform around what a Pentium 4 clocked @ 3.2GHz would. This of course was before taking things like HyperThreading and dual cores into account.

With the X2's, the combined productivity of both cores adds up to what a single-core P4 would need to be clocked to achieve par performance.

And now with the intel Core architecture, this performance metric doesn't seem to apply very much anymore. So now we're starting to see model numbers because there are still too many people out there who fell hook line and sinker into the whole "mhz = performance" model for years and would have a hard time understanding that a ~2GHz Core 2 would positively dominate even a Pentium D clocked a GHz higher. Not to mention that Netburst's performance improvements pretty much ran out of steam at around 3.8GHz. You could clock higher, but the performance return for the heat it would generate at that speed was simply not worth it.