It would seem to me, based on what they say, that it just has to run at 12 MHz in order to achieve that score. There are some advantages to operating at only 12 MHz, including, perhaps, I/O, which might be pretty hard to use with external hardware if its physical cycle >20x as fast as the nominally less than 1 MHz cycle rate at which the original was intended to run.

There are numerous opportunities through which the cycle rate can remain fairly low while the instruction execution rate is sped up due to out-of-order execution, simultaneous execution, etc, but I don't see that large an increase in performance.

I do wonder what the real facts are.

RE