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

Faster clock speed means that more operations can be performed every second, which translates into improved performance.

More cores don’t necessarily improve performance. They enable things to be processed in parallel, which is practical for independent multiple tasks running at once, but impractical for processes having interdependent inputs and outputs.

(Edit) Without increasing clock speed, performance can be improved by increasing the instruction cache size, to store previously-executed commands in the processor itself for quicker retreival instead of retrieving the instructions from external memory. A processor can also be optimized to execute more instructions per clock tick.