[citation][nom]dormantreign[/nom]i sorta want GHZ too. The dolphin emulator requires it and a boat load of applications run faster too with higher GHZ. Hold at 8 cores and push the GHZ envelope to around 6...then add more cores again. Rinse and repeat.[/citation]
You need to bone up on your CPU history, as do all the other people clamoring for "more GHZ."
The clock speed wars ended because it was totally unsustainable. The increase in heat generated from running at higher clock speeds is greater than the amount of extra speed you get. So, for example, if you increase the clock speed 15%, you increase the heat by 30% (not real numbers). Most people don't have access to plentiful liquid nitrogen, so you can't just keep ratcheting up the speed or the chips will literally burn up.
Instead, Intel and AMD have adopted different strategies to make the chips faster. Intel has aggressively optimized the chips to get a higher IPC (Instructions Per Cycle). This means that more gets done on every cycle. AMD was initially pursuing this as well, and was beating Intel in this arena, but in recent years they stagnated and even regressed (I'm looking at you Bulldozer) on their IPC. To compensate, they just cram more cores onto the chip. Works well in some cases, really poorly in others.
So, the chips we see today are a product of these diverging strategies solving the problem of "How do we make chips faster when we can't increase the clock speed?" Intel chips have fewer cores than AMD chips, but each core is much more powerful than an AMD core. This is why Intel totally dominates AMD in single threaded workloads. At a given clock speed, Intel chips are simply faster clock for clock than AMD's. On the other hand, AMD chips can really stretch their legs when presented a multithreaded workload and usually pull ahead of Intel if they can keep all their cores active.