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

Since this is ELI5 and not a technology sub I’m gonna go real real simple.

If you wanna go faster you need more power. More power means more heat. Power and heat is bad. To mitigate this we can go smaller. But we are reaching the limits of how small we can go. Electrons (information) are quite literally jumping the gaps between the information pipelines. This is leading to unacceptable levels of errors which the extra speed doesn’t make up for.

So ELI5. We parallel processing as much as we possibly can now cos we are hitting the limits of speed and right now 4ghz is the consumer level sweet spot.