Recent Intel processors also have something called Turbo Boost. Some vendor motherboards disable this by default. Make sure to go through BIOS settings before performing acceptability tests, as turbo mode can provide up to 25 percent better performance in isolated cases.
This is possible because the maximum speed of the core itself is increased when resources are available. A 2.6 GHz core might operate temporarily at 3.0 GHz. For queries that are dependent on nested loops or other CPU-intensive operations, this can drastically reduce query execution times.
