Intel don't have any more juice in their 100th generation Sandy Bridge refresh, so it's now become about raw clock speed to get more performance. As a result, if AMD can't hit 5GHz on all cores like Intel can, then clearly AMD are trash
It's become the new benchmark, with a hefty dose of deflection. And now that the 9000 series Sandy Bridges have also hit the GHz barrier, it'll be interesting to see how the goalposts shift when Ryzen 3 lands next year and (hopefully) removes the overall performance deficit.