A lot of rumours indicate AMD's Zen architecture will offer 40% improvement over their current offers, giving similar single core/IPC performance similar to Haswell/Skylake...
We've heard this sort of thing before. It sounds like the hype preceding Bulldozer. We all know how that turned out.
Cedar Mill P4's have been known to reach 8GHz during those extreme overclocking events...
There's a whole bunch of reasons for that. We're approaching the limits of lithography which means we can't easily make smaller, faster transistors. On top of that signals propagating through silicon face issues of their own as speeds increase. If you think about it, in one clock tick with a 4GHz CPU light travels only 7.5 cm. Try keeping clock edges in sync at multiple places given that fact. Forget about running PCB traces with signals that fast, at least traces more than a few millimeters. That's why CPUs generate their clocks internally from a much slower external clock. Multicores are facing scaling issues of their own, notable the fact that for most problems throwing more than 8 cores at it doesn't buy you more speed.
Then you would probably cry if you were shopping for rackmount or blade servers.
Well, there's a reason why they're so cheap. It'd probably be cheaper to bulldoze them and start over vs. trying to rehab one. Either way at the end of the day you're still left with a house that's likely to be much nicer than all the ones around it in a bad neighborhood.
