Those are interesting but they're rare exceptions. IBM do these amazing things on super high end chips that very few buy, but the commodity chips that power the PCs and the datacenters of the world (stuck at a little faster than 3GHz, give or take) just don't rely on that stuff very much.
Quite. The more important example would be Pentium. The main thing that was impressive about Northwood was the clock rate. AMD of the same generation, and the Intel Core processors that followed, did more with a lower clock rate.
