Holy crap that's fast. I'm sure it was on liquid helium or something similarly obscene, but still, impressive. It's funny that we've been at such a frequency limit for so long... stuff ships at no more than ~4ghz, though the sandy bridge CPUs will overclock to 5ghz on air, from what I've read. That's impressive and all, but 5 years ago processors were shipping at 3.x ghz, so we're not improving very rapidly any more. More cores and better efficiency has been the road forward. Pure raw clock cycles is still awesome.

I think the process has slowed down because the gain from higher frequencies is insignificant in normal computing. An extra core probably yields better results.

yea... I guess if you're screaming along at 4.2ghz, gaining a couple hundred mhz doesn't really make much of a noticeable difference. You're better off dropping the speed to 3.8ghz and then adding a second (or third or fourth) core. Ah well, it's still awesome how powerful our equipment is becoming.

Speaking of which, did you hear about K supercomputer in Japan getting upgrades that bumped it past the 10 petaflop barrier? Awesome.