How fast is the fastest supercomputer in Hertz?

Question

not in FLOPS but in Hertz

Answer 1

The speed of the processor is pretty much limited by two things - how fast you can get the current through the tiny (almost as small as the "smear" of the current) pathways, and how fast you can suck the heat off the chip.  That's why Intel and AMD went to dual- and quad-core chips.  We've about reached the speed limit for current technology.  Make the pathways smaller (the gurrent gets there faster if it has a smaller distance to travel) and the pathways are too small for current to flow through them.

Answer 2

According to the top 500 site, the Roadrunner by IBM has processors about 3.2 Ghz. However there are about 120,000 processor cores and a petaflop. (Yes, that is a quadrillion operations a second.)

That is the frequency of desktop processors, they don't clock much faster. I think they're even commercially available. However, with so many of them networked they get a lot more done.