Why are the GHz speeds in computers the same after such a long period of time?
In: Engineering
Ask yourself. When did the GHz speeds start to taper off?Around 3-4Ghz or three to four billion oscillations (cycles, flutters or ‘state flips’) per second.
The local heat generated by the chips was becoming a problem in earlier CPUs that could ‘fry’ themselves if the cooling was not put on properly. I remember these problems around 1999-2005 and the ‘bad caps’ phase where condensators on the motherboard would randomly pop and fry.
So they cloned the single CPU into many pipelines and then into many cores, fully parallel processing units in a single chip. But at the moment the software (the programs) lags behind, not always making optimal use of the parallel features.
For a long time (from the 1970s to the early 2000s) there was Moore’s Law, which basically predicted that memory sizes and speeds would increase by doubling every year. But due to processors being made smaller to the 1 nanometer scale, all kinds of ‘cross effects’ started appearing, of nanometer silicon ‘wires’ interfering with others. That is why the miniaturisation could not go on and they started spreading slower cores over a slightly larger area, to assist in cooling and auto cooling.
But separate from Intel, ARM was always a much more heat-effective chipset based on RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing), so it became the chip of choice in mobile phones and embedded devices.
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