why does CPUs/CPU cores seem to be capped at 3 – 4 Ghz since almost a decade?
In: 1368
Thermodynamics and technological restraints only tangential to computing means heat can move only really so fast. Computer fans can only do so much, a liquid coolant can only pull heat out of your processor so fast, but mainly heat will only “voluntarily” move out of the computer chip(s) so fast.
But producing heat has essentially no such limitation.
Each computation creates a little bit of heat, via the resistance in the metal wires and resistors in the computer chips. The faster your clock speed, the faster you’re telling the computer to do computations. The clock speed being too fast for the computer to synchronize or whatever isn’t a problem nowadays, computer chips are small and the speed of light is pretty high at this scale, but the heat stays a problem.
Short answer: higher clock speed means the computer produces more heat, and our cooling technologies aren’t strong enough to pull heat away from the silicon to prevent them from literally melting as heat builds up. So we limit our computers so our cooling systems can keep up.
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