I didn't downvote but: >they can never come down because that would decrease clock rates and lots of people have been trained into believing that clock speeds

I didn't downvote but: >they can never come down because that would decrease clock rates and lots of people have been trained into believing that clock speeds indicate performance is a bold statement that is not likely to be true. Casual metrics of performance change, and I doubt there are many people confused as to whether they choose a 4GHz Pentium 4 over a lower clocked Core 2, much less something like a Xeon E5.