Faster Chips, Kill, Kill, Kill

PCs with blazing-fast 5-GHz CPUs are not only feasible, they should soon be on store shelves, according to chipmakers at a conference in Silicon Valley this week. Intel and AMD have said CPU clock speeds -- measured in gigahertz -- will not increase to the same degree as in years past due to constraints in power consumption and heat. However, the companies will take advantage of increasing chip densities to pack multiple cores onto each chip, resulting in performance leaps. Intel said there may be as many as 100 cores packed on a single processor within 10 years.