<p><span style="font-size: small;"> Intel never quite reached 4GHz with the Pentium 4. Despite being on a dedicated quest for gigahertz the company stopped short and the best we ever got was 3.8GHz. Within a year the clock (no pun intended) was reset and we were all running Core 2 Duos at under 3GHz. With each subsequent generation Intel inched those clock speeds higher, but preferred to gain performance through efficiency rather than frequency.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"> Today, Intel quietly finishes what it started nearly a decade ago. When running a single threaded application, the Core i7-2600K will power gate three of its four cores and turbo the fourth core as high as 4.1GHz. Even with two cores active, the 32nm chip can run them both up to 4GHz. Mission complete.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i5-2600k-i5-2500k-and-core-i3-2100-tested">Read more...</a><br /> </span></p>