Hi Manning,
I see what you mean.
Years ago it appeared like several new technologies were approaching like with transparent sheets and laser or imprinted foils and stuff. All where praised for far superior capacities, but were never heard back of.
Yet, some has been developed over 3 gigs already. Have you heard from that IBM / Toshiba / Sony team chip "Cell"?
It is supposed to be build into out of all Sonys new "playstation 3" next year. It has been announced to enable photo realistic games.
But Sony is also working on home servers with Cell CPUs.
Toshiba plans to implement them into high resolution TVs, and IBM is targeting for high end work stations.
Supposedly MACs will be the first computers on the market to profit from it, cause they get their G5 CPUs already from IBM.
Cell will be consisting of of 9 different processor cores, future versions of even more. The existing model already calculates in the 4.6 GHz range. ( 256 million operations per second ).
Cells are going to be a heavy punch for Intel which is a good thing. The bad thing is that AMD always gets hit as well whenever Intel sucks on stocking market. This could kill the final bit that has remained of my humble AMD stocking values.
However, AMD ought to have the best crews and I suspect that they might be having an answer to the new trio mentioned above already fiddling with in their labs.
So, likely we are going to see further CPU sizing. Well possibel from AMD too, even if it might not prevent them from breaking down economically due to predictable fall of Intel stocking quotations.
Man, I wish AMD would join with Samsung*. THAT would be a killer combo ( and possibly rescue my losses )!
Greets,
Ruphus
* You might have seen that I mentioned prospective Samsung papers recently. See how the uptick looks already. > slaps himself on the shoulder < heh
They will be a long raiser as long as no global crisis was to generally interfere.
( But don´t listen to me, my cousin lost lots of cash when he followed me into AMD and short afterwards the whole market crashed.

)