News Intel starts ignoring clock speeds

From the Inquirer:

IDF is the time(s) of the year when Intel rolls out the red carpet, and shows their vision for the future. Some of it is near term, others long term, with still more being ‘direction’. This time, the message was loud and clear, out, not up.

Intel has been known in the past for ratcheting up clock speeds at a dizzying pace, just how many years ago was it that a 12 MHz 286 was a screamer? How long before we see a 12 GHz 886? While a casual observer might have said that Intel is trying to put on the brakes at IDF, de-emphasizing raw clock speed, the brakes are not being touched, just the steering wheel.

Everything at IDF avoided clock speeds. There was no 10GHz Prescott demo to be seen, no liquid nitrogen cooled chip without a label. They did talk about cores, and lots of them. The code name Tulsa was unveiled at the first keynote, and rather than say it was a Xeon running at a blistering pace that made the audience gasp, they said it was dual cores, and that made the audience gasp.

More gasping here