Technical question about clock speed increases

[sid]

It seems like about 5 years now as we haven't really progressed past 3ghz signigicantly.

Thinking about it I realised that 3ghz equates to a cycle duration of about 333ps. During such a short time, the distance that light travels is about 10cms.

To put this into comparison the ATX board is about 30 cms long, so my point is

Are we we likely to see significant increases in clock speeds in the future? as shorter cycles mean more time wasted waiting for data to return?

Does anyone know how many cycles of current cpus are actually used to do useful work? I.e. whats the percentage idle time for the current cpus?

I'm interested in a technical response here.

Regards,
sid

 

[sid]

Clock speeds I beleive are capped currently because the temperatures start to get high without good cooling over 3ghz. Thats always been my understanding to why we are at around 3ghz barrier. havent a clue what your going on about though

Take for example anything over 4.5ghz and you need to start looking at phase or LN2 cooling

No you've got the wrong end of the stick here I think. Its just I think its diminishing returns for the reasons I've said and also that you can probs squeeze better performance by designing a better cpu with more cores rather than something crap but running it high frequency.

Although perhaps you are right and I'm overthinking it a bit....

Hypothetically, an old cpu design like p4 could run stupidly high speeds on a 45nm tech base but you couldn't efficiently use all the extra clock cycles. You'd just be waiting for data yeah because signals simply can't travel fast enough?

sid

 

[sid]

Well a reduction in transistor size will significantly reduce power consumption, dont forget, so 10ghz may well be doable within reasonable thermal limits.

Also consider low power cpus like atom which could run significantly higher , couldn't they.

Anyways, the heat issue wasn't something I'm interested in. ITs the performance impact due to speed of communication

sid

 

[sid]

Heat and electronic migration are the issues for the current technology, we will move to a non silicon based cpu to get past the current blocks.
However regardless of 3GHZ the I7/6/5 cpus are more efficient and out perform 3GHZ P4's with no effort at all

Hmmm I suppose its impossible to run at high frequency without high voltage to reduce the electrons tunnelling which then makes a lot of heat...

 

[sid]

Exactly, this problem must exist today as shown in the OP so I wonder how it really works

sid