Has Intel reached the speed limit?

[metalmackey]

Hi guys,

I was thinking, CPU clocks used to double in speed of Ghz every 18 months or so. Speed increases (in terms of clock speed) seems to have not gone up recently. Has current methods of making CPUs reached the max they can get in spped? Will we see say a 10Ghz CPU using current methods and materials used to make a CPU?

I know they "speed" up the CPU by adding cores, memory and doing more inscructions per clock cycle, but I'm just wondering about pure Ghz here.

Thanks

 

[paininlife]

i thnk if thy increse the GHZ thn it wil release more heat, ?

 

[Duke]

I guess they started to reach the limits and it works out better to have several cores instead?

32nm chips coming next year so speeds will be up a little.

 

[twist3d0n3]

is it graphene they're testing as logic gates which should make things leap in speed?

 

[Corasik]

Clock speed is only half the equation though. Pentium 4's hit 3.8Ghz or so "officially", but in terms of how much work they did per clock cycle, a 3.8Ghz P4 is easily outperformed by a Core2 processor running at just 1.9Ghz (ish).

Why... because the P4 can do 2 instructions per clock cycle per core (on average), while the Core 2 duo can knock out 4 instructions in 1 clock cycle (occasionally 5 as it is able to combine certain instructions and execute them together)

i7's are about the same as core 2's but the ability to combine instructions was improved (and fixed for 64 bit as well), they are also somewhat better optimized, but fundamentally they are just a minor retune of the core 2 range.

Potentially we could see i7's being sold at 4ghz, they certainly overclock well enough to be "officially" released at that speed, but AMD arnt really giving intel enough of a chase when it comes to performance for intel to bother. (AMD are pushing the value market far more aggressively than the ultimate performance side of things).

Improved techs and processes will continue to come along, but its anyones guess if intel will attempt to push out say an 8 issue core, or just a faster higher clock speed 4 issue core. (An 8 issue core would in theory be able to process 8 instructions together in a single clock cycle).

GHZ is a completely meaningless number when it comes to raw CPU speed. The most desirable processor is the one that is able to do the most work, while running at the lowest clock speed and lowest power utilization.

Also the higher the clock speed, the harder it is to prevent the cpu from blasting out radio waves as a side effect of their high speed.

 

[moremoney]

No, but if they offered you a 50% performance increase in one jump, could you afford the price increase.
Some could but most couldn't, there is no market for such speed increases.

And there is more profit in small measures.

 

[Hotwired]

Indeed, why stretch too far and not leave yourself anything to "advance" to for future products.

All they need to do is aim themselves just far enough of AMD to be comfortable. Not too far or they lose out on milking the tech they have just released and end up having to work harder to find improvements to stuff in for the next release.

Hey, at least there is some competition. If AMD kicked the bucket Intel could really stagnate with no real reason to push forward. Consumers won't be going anywhere else ^_^

 

[JonJ678]

Excellent post Corasik, thank you.