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

This has actually been the case for about 2 decades now. As others have pointed out, even some Pentium 4 CPUs were already at 3 GHz

One of the fundamental issues in the chip industry today is that adding more cores is a much worse solution than speeding up single-core performance. Two cores capable of 1-GFlops operations each is much inferior to a single 2-GFlop core. The reason for this is [Amdahl’s Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law), if you’re keen on some further reading! 🙂

Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, speeding up Single-core speed is very hard