AMD's latest FX-55 CPU has an operating speed of 2.6GHz, and uses a special manufacturing technique called "strained silicon" on top of AMD's already well-defined 130nm process. The latest K8 cores are being manufactured using a new 90nm process, but their initial max speed is 2.2GHz for the S939 A64 3500+.

It is quite likely that by combining the new 90nm process with strained silicon technology and further process optimizations, AMD could reach 3GHz. At 3GHz the K8 core could prove a formidable competitor to Intel's Itanium2 for "big-iron" supercomputers.