This doesn't necessarily invalidate the product, but it really does put me off it. If they're going to market a product like that it's going to be to a pretty techy crowd and they should get their terminology right.
A lot of companies are using the combined totals to tell how fast/big/etc something is. It isn't even a recent development either.
Just for one example, if you go to Dell's store right now you'll find computers with 8 GB of RAM; but what they fail to tell you is that that is 2x4 GB sticks rather than 1x8 GB stick. So it is actually the "total" RAM in the machine.
Now you might argue that for technical reasons there is a difference between how RAM and CPU-cores are exposed to the underlying software, but that within its self is only true in some infrastructural designs, but not true in others (e.g. Sometimes two cores pretend to be one, sometimes a single core pretends to be two).
RAM, however, can be added together as data can be cached across one or more sticks. Thus adding another stick of RAM does increase the overall total amount of RAM available.
I'm not an expert on this, but I believe this is why clusters are measured in calculations per second (eg FLOPS) rather than frequencies. Calculations run in parallel (such as clusters do) are increasing the overall number of calculations performed per second. Where as multiple cores running in parallel don't increase the clock frequency.
Two small shovels aren't the same as one big shovel, but two small bags of dirt are basically the same as one big bag of dirt. If you're going to continue with the memory analogy, this would be like combining the graphics memory and general purpose RAM into a single figure.
But if I watch 1 clock for 60 seconds, the amount of time that has passed is exactly the same as if I watch 2 clocks for 60 seconds or 100 clocks for 60 seconds.
It does not make any sense at all for them to add the numbers up, aside from being able to present a huge single number for marketing purposes. Even non tech people understand that a 4 x 2ghz processor is not a 8ghz processor....
Having spoken to a few non-tech people I'm pretty sure that I could find a bunch who don't understand anything in that sentence.
Having spoken to some supposedly tech-savvy children on 4chan /g/ I know that there's a lot of confusion about cores and processors and speed, and that's before you talk about potential benefits and disbenefits.
As incredibly misleading as it is, our objections may largely come from preconceived notions of what a hz is. We want it to be a function of a single core because that's how we grew up thinking about it.
Now, let's say that I have a cuckoo clock that chimes once per hour. This is a rate of ~ 278 μHz. Now, imagine that I buy 3600 of these clock and set them to offset them by 1 second each. I now have 3600 x 278 μHz signals. However, I also have 1 clock going off every second. Thus, the frequency rate for the entire system is 1 Hz, even though the individual components have a much slower rate.
Now, let's say that I didn't do such a great job in aligning the signals of the clocks. Some are 2 seconds apart while others are mere milliseconds apart. From a Fourier transform perspective, there's now multiple signals with multiple frequencies occurring. However, if I average over a long time period, I'm still getting 3600 events per hour, or 1 event per second. The signal may not be a perfect sine curve, but, barring a pathological timing, the strongest Fourier component is going to be the 1Hz signal. Thus, 1Hz would be a reasonable way to describe the cuckoo bird rate of the system.
It's not perfect - but is a lot easier than dealing with having to look up Intel CPU numbers to see how many cores it has, then multiplying that by the clock speed, then guessing. Getting the total cycles means you can jump straight to the guessing ("estimating") part.
This might fool non-tech people, but non-tech people will not buy this product anyway.