Does the age of the processor matter for encoding?

[jriker1]

I currently have a system with 2 12 core 2.4GHZ Xeon x5680 3.33 GHz CPU's. I have been reading a lot these general comments that "the speed of the CPU is the most important for video encoding". One thing I find interesting is in the old days as they say, the newer the CPU the higher the speed. Now that's not always the case. So take my CPU. Newer models of the same Dell server system all come with e5-2600 lower speed CPU's maxing out at 2.4 GHz. Would those processors do video conversion faster than my older processor even though my overall speed is listed higher than a newer CPU in a similar system?

Thanks.

JR