The fastest stock clock speed I have ever seen on a CPU the is currently available to the public is the Intel Core 2 Quad 4.0 GHz. (it may be overclocked) For the past few years, clocks on CPU's never seemed to get substantially higher. Is there some kind of thermal limit to how fast you can run electricity through a circuit without it melting/catching fire? They seemed to just add more CPU cores on one die working in tandem. I remember when the Pentium 4 was released, which was solely based on high clock speeds. I read something on the internet recently about a dual, quad-core CPU computer (eight cores) with each core running at 6.0 GHz. (48.0 GHz) I know that if you tried to overclock a pentium 4 to 6.0 GHz, it would immediately melt and/or catch fire, even with liquid nitrogen cooling it. I'm not an electrical engineer, nor a computer scientist. But I was wondering if maybe in a five years or so we will see 8-16-32+ CPU core systems with each core running at maybe 6.0-12.0 GHz.