Probably what surprised me the most was how much faster the 1GHz Pandora ran the new code vs the old CC Pandora, even when they were both clocked at 900MHz. Based on the difference seen in other emulators I didn’t expect this much. I definitely recommend getting a 1GHz unit if you still have a CC or Rebirth unit and play a lot of DS games.
The 1GHz units have two CPU advantages that I know of (beyond more clock speed of course): faster main memory and twice as much L1 cache. The former could mean lower latency and not just more bandwidth. I don’t really know which contributes more