Wirt wrote: >What a difference a week can make. Today, IBM broke even those bounds. It >announced plans to start work on a 10,000 MHz processor. ======================================================== Wirt, the article you excerpted said IBM had contracted with DOE to build a supercomputer "capable of executing 10 trillion instructions per second". This is definitely NOT the same thing as a 10,000 MHz processor! First of all, a machine cycle is undoubtedly longer than one clock pulse. Secondly, we don't know whether the processor under development will complete one instruction per cycle. The third salient point is that it is extremely doubtful that the supercomputer being developed is a single-processor machine. These are some of the same reasons that clock speed is a virtually useless number for comparing the performance of two machines of different architecture. A case in point: HP9000's (and 3000's) frequently outperform machines with much faster clocks when compared on the basis of transaction rates.