4Ghz Reality

So I was reading today that IBM has broken 4Ghz with it's new Power6 porocessors.
Well in fact thats all Ive heard - no actual indication of the speeds reached, just that they broke a magic margin!!

Some techy stuff for those interested:
- IBM have reduced the power consumption of the chip when idle to help keep the temps lower at the higher speeds.
- The pipelines are not as deep as current Chips, deep pipelines = higher speeds but are innefficient. IBM have managed to use virtulization tech to reduce the size of the pipelines and make the chips run faster
- And then a load of guff about the execution units, a white paper that lasted 40+ pages and is of little interest to the sane 99.9% of the world :P

It got me thinking tho, the gap between commercial products (such a Intel and AMD cpu's) and less commercial tech (like IBM stuff) is reducing! We won't have to wait as long for commercial products to break 4Ghz as we have for previous milestones. Why though?

Maybe it's because development has slowed down - due to it approaching the speed 'limit' or is it because technology has taken different turns. Will we have to wait an age for quad core and octal core processors? Hopefully not, but I suspect so.

The lack of interest this speed milestone has actually generated just about confirms (for me) that the clock speed wars are over. So it's the core wars next - which could be even more fun....