The “x3 circuit”, a nontrivial portion of the Pentium processor, is dedicated to multiplying ... fewer operations than doing so in base-2 (binary). Instead of handling each bit separately ...

If the system becomes unstable you may have to bump up the processor voltage (which involves another piece of wire). In the article, Dan Zhang is able to take a 1.8GHz Pentium M to 2.4GHz.