1.6 GHz!!!!!!! Confirmed than, MS is building supercomputer:
"The Blue Gene/Q processor is an 18 core chip running at 1.6 GHz with special features for fast thread context switching, quad SIMD floating point unit, 5D torus chip-to-chip network and 2 GB/s external I/O. The cores are linked by a crossbar switch at half core speed to a 32 MB eDRAM L2 cache. The L2 cache is multi-versioned and supports transactional memory and speculative execution. A Blue Gene/Q chip has two DDR3 memory controllers running at 1.33 GHz, supporting up to 16 GB RAM."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene
On the serious note, first thing that came to my mind when I read this is that (at the time) crazy rumour of 16-core 720 - so naturally I thought of PowerPC AC2 (some version of it, not necessarily 16-core):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_A2
