> Freescale's representation of the 5121e SoC's three cores as having
> a combined 1700 MIPS

...has been invented by you.

> It's a combined measure of performance.

DMIPS figures are measures of Dhrystone benchmark performances. While often mistaken for doing so by people who are less educated in the field of computer hardware, clock frequencies as such don't indicate performance unless the compared hardware is sufficiently similar on the core level. In the case of the C515 you could use the *real* clock speed of its ARM11 core to compare it to other ARM11 based tablets. If you know only the sum of the components' added clock speeds you can't really compare the performance to another device's performance because you don't know how the sum is portioned between the components. Theoretically speaking, if the "800 MHz" is the result of adding up clock speeds the C515's SoC could have a 100 MHz CPU, a 100 MHz GPU and a 600 MHz DSP. Knowing that a DSP, like I told you, is only usable to a very small range of software, do you anticipate the difference this would make in terms of real performance in everyday usage?