system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: My seven year old laptop has a 2.2Ghz processor. Brand new laptops have processors with even lower clock rate. How are they faster?

EDIT: Thanks everyone!
gpt
Newer processors are more efficient think of it as gas mileage. Clock rate only tells you how fast the processor is stepping but tells you nothing of what the processor actually gets done with each step. If processor A does 2 instruction per clock cycle and processor B can do 4 per clock cycle than processor B can literally be ran at half the speed of A and still be faster in terms of doing work. 

That's why newer processor are faster than your laptops. Yes increasing the clock rate is a way to increase performance but it's the lazy mans way and it comes with draw backs. Increasing clock rate increases heat / power consumption and decreases stability. So the real goal for the processor companies is to make their newer processors more efficient.

Lastly, it is likely that a newer processor has more cores than your 7 year old laptop and programs that are coded to use multiple cores will run much faster than they do on a single core.

Edit: Yeah i realize that what i said originally doesn't add up technically you'd have to run Processor B  faster at least by a little than half the speed of processor A for it to be faster.