– What is limiting computer processors to operate beyond the current range of clock frequencies (from 3 to up 5GHz)?
In: Engineering
Size, Power, and electrical limitations.
Size: Currently there are only so many standards for CPU sockets. The amount of surface area to place components on is finite, so it becomes a game of optimization to place as many components (transistors mostly) on the CPU itself.
Power: This one is kind of a two-fer. You need to up the power the CPU uses as the clock rate goes up (for the most part, new advances in transistor and CPU design resets the power requirements a bit for a little while. In addition, with more power comes more heat, and heat can affect the performance of the components on a CPU. This is the reason your computer has cooling mostly.
Electronics: The transistor works essentially by electrons hopping over a little wall. The smaller a transistor is the more we can fit on a board (and the less energy it uses technically). However if the transistor gets too small, electrons will be able to hop over that wall on their own (which we don’t want)
It gets a bit more complex than that but the rest is mostly just compounding these same issues over multiple cores and layers of printed circuit board and etc.
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