why does CPUs/CPU cores seem to be capped at 3 – 4 Ghz since almost a decade?

Question

why does CPUs/CPU cores seem to be capped at 3 – 4 Ghz since almost a decade?

In: 1368

Answer 1

Increasing clock speed increases power consumption, making a CPU harder to cool and more likely to throttle. There is also a hard limit on how high clock speed can get because of how fast an electrical signal can go from one side of the processor to the other. Clock speed is just one of many things that can affect the performance of a CPU, over the past decade clock speed hasn’t increased all that much but processors are much faster than they were 10 years ago because of other improvements. The architecture of a CPU can be improved so more calculations can be done each clock cycle, the CPU can better predict what data it will need soon and load it into it’s cache for quick access and parts of the CPU can be designed to be very efficient at specific uses.