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Comment on Intel predicts 10GHz chips by 2011 (from 2000)parent

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Im not an anything (maybe hacker) but my understand is that its centred on power and current materials. I understand it as follows:

Increasing clock speed means increasing power usage, smaller designs means that quantum tunnelling effects increases the probability of electron leakage - requiring even more power, conversely more power makes electrons more likely to leak making cpus less efficient and hotter. performing non reversible computation increases entropy as information is converted to heat, more heat means less efficient and less reliable. So using current materials, more smaller transistors operating at high clock speeds performing non reversible computations means a lot of power and heat. My take is that they are trading away clock speed and keeping smaller sizes and a slightly better more 3d architecture to keep gains up.

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