CPUs aren’t getting faster clock speeds and they aren’t getting more cores. How are they improving in performance?

Question

CPUs aren’t getting faster clock speeds and they aren’t getting more cores. How are they improving in performance?

In: 18

Answer 1

They’re getting more cores still. We’ve recently started seeing more 16, 32, and even 64 core CPU’s.
But we’ve kinda hit a limit on clock-speed, because it produces too much heat. So about 5Ghz, maybe 5.5Ghz, and it starts becoming too unstable, unless you apply some serious cooling.

But, we are hitting a limit on transistor size too. We’re down to about 4nm I think, and this is starting to become problematic too, and unstable (electrons start jumping the gap, and this messes with the CPU).

So, new tech entirely, is needed to improve performance even further. This includes 2 things (possibly more):
1. Processors based on light instead of electrons.
2. Processors taking advantage of quantum mechanics.

The latter won’t improve performance much in day-to-day tasks though.