Like other comments said, there are a lot of factors that go into determining the performance of a clock cycle. One of the more interesting fields here is the optimization of instructions themselves - Agner Fog has a great document[0] comparing the performance of common x86 instructions across multiple CPU generations. It becomes really easy to see how great the early Ryzen chips were despite their low clock speeds.

[0] https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf