Excuse the late hit - let me clarify a few things.
My area of expertise is high transaction systems architecture. I started out in hardware - designing disk controllers, then array controllers. I went over to the dark side long ago, first in driver design, then query processor architecture, then higher level systems analysis. I can still go down to the metal in almost any area of database application.
I have characterized a lot of system components in the course of that work, I know a lot about how to talk to CPUs, how to optimize performance for various loads, how to measure results accurately. I know almost nothing about how CPUs or any silicon products are made.
My investments have been almost exclusively in tech, and I have done pretty well in applying what I see as trends in performance or usability as a proxy for how a company will do. But I moved almost my whole portfolio into real estate about 4 years ago, and have done little to use forums like this to fill in the gaps in my knowledge since that time.
The current economic situation seemed like a buying opportunity, and I have begun to build up modest positions in some tech stocks. I don't intend to come off as an expert in CPU design - just the opposite. If I lay out what looks to me like a trend and ask those who have a more fundamental understanding of the business to support or contradict my thinking, I would expect a facts based discourse. I didn't think that I needed to provide footnotes and links for the assertions I made - I just want to understand whether my ideas hold water or not.
It looks to me like you are picking at the way I am presenting, rather than discussion the underlying intent. It seems clear now, from posters who DID address my underlying assumption, that changes in the way CPUs are made mean that routine increases in clock, whether they were double in a year or two years or 50% in a year or 25% in 8 months, are a thing of the past, and that newer products will have a relatively narrow performance band largely determined by the process technology.
You also go for hyperbole - like ridiculously inflated vision of AMD's future clock speeds. I may not know how it's made, but I do know how to measure - and I have a straight from newegg AMD Phenom II 940 which runs 3.6G at stock voltage, has less than 100W dissipation (measured with a calibrated heat sink, not a guesstimate) after 30 minutes at 100% load, and temps at the IHS (as opposed to whatever the 'built in' sensor says) of 44C, which does not strike me as a dangerous level. From that, the idea of going up 5% in clock to 3.8G, or even 10% to 4G, did not seem out of the range of possibility. Perhaps it is, but that does not seem obvious to me even after some of the explanations here. Maybe it can't be done, but there is not much in any technology that can't tolerate a 5% increase in almost any dimension from a stable operating point. I would therefore assert that suggesting a 5-10% increase in clock speed from what I am running is at least a reasonable possibility, and no engineer with an interest in getting at the facts would claim it to be 'ridiculously inflated'. I don't question that you are competent in whatever your domain of expertise is - but you sure don't seem very objective, especially about AMD.
Even at the 3.6G clock, the AMD chip is slower and lower performing than a similar older core 2 part with the same kind of reasonable overclock applied. Maybe I should have said 'what if they release a 3.6G part' since I know that can be done within the published thermal and voltage numbers. But you would likely have some problem with that also.
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