Why are the GHz speeds in computers the same after such a long period of time?
In: Engineering
I’ll give you an analogy.
Let’s say you want to clean your kitchen.
Increasing the frequency (ghz) is sort of like you moving around and doing things faster, eg walking, picking things up etc. Now, you can get yourself pretty fast if you drink a lot of coffee say, but you will reach a limit.
Now to get around this limit we can do two things in our kitchen cleaning analogy.
Adding another person to help you clean is like adding another core. As time has moved on the cores or in the analogy people over time are able to work together better, eg not getting In each others way, blocking the sink. There is a limit with this too, think of trying to clean your kitchen with 20 people, you wouldn’t be able to manage that in normal circumstances at home.
And the other way to improve performance is how you can accomplish a task. Back to the kitchen analogy. Compare manually sweeping up the dust and crumbs with a brush and using a vacuum cleaner. Or adding in a dishwasher. Lots of the performance gains in processors these days are also from optimizing how they perform common sub tasks that they will run into.
I hope that clears it up a bit.
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