nonsense. rocket-chip has been taped out at 45nm and achieved 1.5ghz, years ago. india's shakti core is going into 20nm and as a 6-stage pipeline will run at

nonsense. rocket-chip has been taped out at 45nm and achieved 1.5ghz, years ago. india's shakti core is going into 20nm and as a 6-stage pipeline will run at 2.5ghz. as that one uses only 120mW, even 16 2.5ghz cores would only consume around 3 watts (!!!). caveat of course: the L1/L2 cache power consumption isn't included in that figure, but, crucially, with the Compressed Instructions reducing cache misses by 20-25% that's equivalent to having approximately double the I-cache size. basically by a fresh start they're on to a winner.