Quote Originally Posted by TheCarLessDriven View Post
When are we going to see a fundamental change in how they produce these chips, geared more towards clock speeds?? You would think by now we would be at 4ghz stock chips shipping. Why are we still in the 2.5ghz low 3.0 ghz range stock?? These 6-cores should be shipping with 5ghz stock IMO. back in the Pentium 4 days they were all about speeds going up. Now its all about cores that cant even be utilized to their full extent by most people buying them.
IIRC, IBM's POWER6 series of CPU's were running at stock speeds of nearly 5.00GHz.

Perhaps there are certain barriers in the x86 ISA that make scaling clock speeds with sustainable levels of power consumption difficult?