Why are the GHz speeds in computers the same after such a long period of time?
In: Engineering
Imagine you had a maid who comes in and cleans your house every day. Over time it turns out you make more of a mess so you make the maid work faster and faster. But realistically, there’s only so fast she can work. That’s the problem with clock speed. You can make it faster and faster, but there’s only so fast it can reasonably go.
A much better solution is to hire multiple maids and have them work at a reasonable pace. So while one cleans the kitchen, another is cleaning the living room, etc. Overall, the amount of work they can get through is more than one maid working really fast. This is like a CPU with multiple cores.
So basically, instead of struggling to make 1 CPU that runs at 10ghz (which is really hard), manufacturers instead make a 4 core CPU where each core runs at, say, 2.5ghz, for roughly the same overall performance, and that’s really easy.
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