CPUs aren’t getting faster clock speeds and they aren’t getting more cores. How are they improving in performance?
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The clock speed have never actually matched the number of instructions per seconds. Usually a processor takes several clock cycles to execute a single instruction. For example on early processor the process of adding two numbers together might have taken at least three clock cycles, one to move one register into the adder, another cycle to move the other register into the adder and a third cycle to move the output from the adder to the output register, and then more cycles to read and parse the next instruction.
More advanced processors are able to execute instructions with fewer cycles. In this case the next processor might have an extra data bus with the associated transistors for the MUXers and the control logic associated with this bus. Then both input registers could be loaded into the adder in the first cycle and the second cycle might have moved the output to its register at the same time the next instruction is read. So for some more transistors you would have doubled the speed of the processor even with the same clock frequency.
Modern processors are able to execute multiple instructions in parallel using different parts of the same processing core. Even with the result of one instruction being used in the next the instructions can be combined and executed much faster then isolated. Or they can execute two different threads in the same core as the instructions do not run on the same data.
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