The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements).

Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.

The i486DX 33MHz was introduced in May 1990. A 30x increase, or about five doublings, in clock speeds over ten years. That's of course not the whole truth; the Athlon could do much more in one cycle than the 486. In any case, in 2010 we clearly did not have 30GHz processors – by then, the era of exponentially rising clock speeds was very decidedly over. I bought an original quadcore i7 in 2009 and used it for the next fifteen years. In that time, roughly one doubling in the number of cores and one doubling in clock speeds occurred.

The Athlon XP was the bigger milestone, as I remember it.

They were both "seventh generation" according to their marketing, but you could get an entire GHz+ Athlon XP machine for much less than half the $990 tray price from the article.

I distinctly remember the day work bought a 5 or 6 node cluster for $2000. (A local computer shop gave us a bulk discount and assembled it for them, so sadly, I didn't poke around inside the boxes much.)

We had a Solaris workstation that retailed for $10K in the same office. Its per-core speed was comparable to one Athlon machine, so the cluster ran circles around it for our workload.

Intel was completely missing in action at that point, despite being the market leader. They were about to release the Pentium 4, and didn't put anything decent out from then to the Core 2 Duo. (The Pentium 4 had high clock rates, but low instructions per cycle, so it didn't really matter. Then AMD beat Intel to market with 64 bit support.)

I suspect history is in the process of repeating itself. My $550 AMD box happily runs Qwen 3.5 (32B parameters). An nvidia board that can run that costs > 4x as much.

What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?

I remember back in 2006 I used to browse overclock forums to overclock my pentium 4, I tons of fun consuming lots of instructions, I learned the bios, changed PLL clocks, mem clocks etc.

I have very fond memories of my first dual-cpu Athlon machine.

It was the workstation on which I learned Logic Audio before, you know, Apple bought Emagic. I took that machine, running very low latency Reason to live gigs with my band.

Carting around a full-tower computer (not to mention the large CRT monitor we needed) next to a bunch of tube Fender & Ampeg amps was wild at the time. Finding a good drummer was hard; we turned that challenge into a lot of fun programming rhythm sections we could jam to, and control in real-time, live.

Argh. The headline. The opener. Awful. Where are editors in 2026? There's no way an LLM would write this.

The GHz barrier wasn't special. What was much more important was the fact that AMD was giving Intel a hard time and there was finally hard competition.