Why are the GHz speeds in computers the same after such a long period of time?
In: Engineering
Imagine you had to blow into a straw. If you blew slowly, it’s pretty easy. If you blew hard you’d get a lot of resistance but it’s possible. Now try blowing with your full strength. It’s very hard right? Now try the same with 2 straws. It’s suddenly a lot easier to blow air out of them. What if you had 4 or even 8? It’s similar in computers. It becomes very hard to make it tick tock after a certain point (which seems to be about now). But it is fairly easy to add more things that go tick tocking, as you have to solve more logistical issues rather that technical ones.
so if you were over 5: making a cpu with a clock speed of say 8 GHz would require a lot of advanced physics, possibly a better understanding of quantum mechanics and so on (other comments explain this better). The only thing you have to figure out with sticking more cores is, how do you remove the heat from there (as it’s a very small surface and you can conduct so much heat per square cm), how to keep them supplied with things to do. These are not easy things to tackle, but are easier than increasing clock speed. Now, this makes the job of a programmer harder, but apparently it doesn’t seem too bad for now.
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