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 the clockspeed is by no means impossible but means significant cooling and energy costs. If Intel or AMD spent 10 years and billions of dollars they could likely develop something that allowed significantly higher clockspeeds such as cooling built into the chip, but the question is if there is any demand for a single, extremely expensive core with insanely high clock speeds.

You can basically divide software into multithreaded and single threaded. Since increasing clockspeed is so expensive it turbs out to be far more efficient to increase performance by running programs multithreaded (although it doesn’t scale perfectly, look up Amdahl’s law). The enormous difference in performance pretty much means that anything that needs to run quickly will be multithreaded (or maybe built to run on a gpu) and for everything else performance isn’t important enough to be willing to pay for significantly higher operating costs.