Anyway, here's hoping that this makes Intel feel the need to actually compete for the high-end gaming segment. It would make the gaming hardware scene more exciting, if nothing else.
I doubt Intel would react, they have IVB-E coming out soon enough. Since they are sticking with six cores, we should see a bump in clocks (assuming Intel managed to cold solder the CPU to the IHS).
There is no way AMD redesigned Vishera to accomplish this feat, way too expensive. When AMD was running their own fabs, they were constantly tweaking the process parameters (IIRC). It's possible that they found a way to get vCore down low enough to make this possible, but there is a downside (which we wouldn't know about) - most likely is a horrible yield (so a limited run of X wafers to produce maybe a few thousand of these - in which case the price would make sense). It could be worth it for AMD to briefly steal some thunder in the extreme enthusiast market - and that might be enough to boost general sales of Vishera CPUs a bit (which wouldn't only be a direct cash benefit, but would also lower payments to GFL under the WSA).
They would also have to work with one mobo vendor to design a board specifically to support this processor with very high efficiency VRMs and some sort of fancy vapor chamber cooling for the same (so the motherboards would probably be priced pretty close the the CPU price).
Still, it seems like a real long shot, even if vCore was much lower and the electrical properties of the chosen CPUs were exceptional, AMD would still need to get the power usage down to something like 300 W, that's 40% lower than what IDK got!! Even then, I doubt it would be run on air, but rather use AMD's H2O cooler.
If this rumor is vaguely real, then Kudos to AMD, at least they are trying something (more like the old AMD used to do). If not, some websites got allot of page hits from creating a rumor