Cnet is reporting that IBM has announced a method of altering silicon that will allow its next generation of Power chips to run at speeds between 4 and 5 gigahertz, and consume less power as well.
From the article: "Instead of just making transistors smaller, IBM came up with a process to alter how silicon behaves by placing a layer of insulator underneath a layer of silicon less than 500 atoms thick ... The higher speed of the Power6 will be achieved with existing chip manufacturing technology that etches transistors only 65 nanometers wide, several hundred times smaller than a human blood cell."
These won"t be out until 2007, but it still raises the question: did Apple jump the gun by switching to Intel?