That's one of the reasons why we're having difficulty making 'em smaller (though semiconductor engineers are very clever and keep coming up with new methods on that front)), but doesn't have much to do with making 'em faster. We've been making 'em smaller and smaller all the time, but clock speed hasn't gone up since ~2004.
And yet the latest i7s run circles around the CPUs of that time period, even when running code that is strictly single-threaded.
There have been tons of performance wins made over the last 10 years that aren't just from adding more cores and Intel's predictions were more or less right on the money, if you overlook the marketing mistake common at that time of using ghz as a shorthand for overall chip performance.
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That's one of the reasons why we're having difficulty making 'em smaller (though semiconductor engineers are very clever and keep coming up with new methods on that front)), but doesn't have much to do with making 'em faster. We've been making 'em smaller and smaller all the time, but clock speed hasn't gone up since ~2004.
"but clock speed hasn't gone up since ~2004."
And yet the latest i7s run circles around the CPUs of that time period, even when running code that is strictly single-threaded.
There have been tons of performance wins made over the last 10 years that aren't just from adding more cores and Intel's predictions were more or less right on the money, if you overlook the marketing mistake common at that time of using ghz as a shorthand for overall chip performance.