Not necessarily. The fact is that you could probably do just exactly that by making the pipeline deeper. But making the pipeline deeper has a price: your contro

Not necessarily. The fact is that you could probably do just exactly that by making the pipeline deeper. But making the pipeline deeper has a price: your control logic becomes much more complex and emptying the pipeline is more expensive. The question is then: does the price you pay become larger than the gain. As this is not happening I have a good guess :) Historically, the Pentium 4 is an example of a Mhz-oriented design. The pipeline was made ridiculously deep. This meant that when you had heavy floating point intensive work, then the Pentium 4 was very very fast. Essentially this was because you could fill up the pipeline in the CPU and you have relatively few jumps in that code. It was just a processing job. On the other hand, the P4 suffered for almost any other task. Even to the point where a more beefy Pentium 3 (Tualatin) could beat it. Intel chose a path which was based on the P3 design for their Pentium-M CPU and that is the design which guided Core, Core 2 Duo, Core i7 and so on. So it is possible, but it is not a given it would lead to faster CPUs. Mhz is but one of the knobs you can turn. The problem we are facing is that all the parallelism we can squeeze out of a sequential program has been done. Modern CPUs dynamically parallelizes what can be run concurrently. But to gain more, now, you need to write programs in a style where they expose more parallelism. Welcome to parallel programming :)