Seven years ago, if somebody had told you that in seven years time, the fastest processor on the market would be clocked at 3.4ghz, they would have been laughed out of town. Until that point, clock speeds had steadily increased, I'd say they probably doubled every 2 years, something like that. Even in spite of improvements in architecture.
Now don't get me wrong, I've been around the block enough times to know that clockspeed isn't everything. Nowadays cpus have multiple cores, and even a single Sandybridge core at 3.4ghz is going to be way faster than a P4 even at 5 or 6ghz. It's good that cpus are getting more efficient and becoming faster clock-for-clock.
However, what I've also wondered about is why to my knowledge we still haven't had a retail cpu at 4ghz or more? To my knowledge the fastest (in clockspeed terms) we've ever seen was 3.8ghz from Intel back in 2004. AMD have a 3.7ghz part on the market today. But still no 4ghz.
Why do I care so long as performance keeps increasing? Well, I just want to have my cake and eat it. I want more better performance per clock AND higher clockspeeds. Pentium was faster than 486 yet had better clocks too. P2 was faster than Pentium yet had better clocks too. Surely Intel could get a slightly better retail cooler, bump up the voltage a tad and come out with a 2700k or whatever at 4ghz bearing in mind the overclocking success people have had.
It just seems a bit alien to me running cpus with the same headline clockspeed for so long. I even went through three upgrades (P4-1.8A, A64 3000+ Venice, C2D E4300) all at the same clockspeed of 1.8ghz, that's when I started to notice things were starting to plateau on that front. A far cry from previous upgrades which had always seen my clockspeed more than double (650mhz, 300mhz, 133mhz etc).
So is it some sort of technical limitation with heat dissipation or what? Just a question of manufacturers prefering to pile on more cores and getting better efficiency from that? I mean looking back to what I would have projected back in the day, by 2011 I'd have been expecting to be running a 5-digit clockspeed.
Now don't get me wrong, I've been around the block enough times to know that clockspeed isn't everything. Nowadays cpus have multiple cores, and even a single Sandybridge core at 3.4ghz is going to be way faster than a P4 even at 5 or 6ghz. It's good that cpus are getting more efficient and becoming faster clock-for-clock.
However, what I've also wondered about is why to my knowledge we still haven't had a retail cpu at 4ghz or more? To my knowledge the fastest (in clockspeed terms) we've ever seen was 3.8ghz from Intel back in 2004. AMD have a 3.7ghz part on the market today. But still no 4ghz.
Why do I care so long as performance keeps increasing? Well, I just want to have my cake and eat it. I want more better performance per clock AND higher clockspeeds. Pentium was faster than 486 yet had better clocks too. P2 was faster than Pentium yet had better clocks too. Surely Intel could get a slightly better retail cooler, bump up the voltage a tad and come out with a 2700k or whatever at 4ghz bearing in mind the overclocking success people have had.
It just seems a bit alien to me running cpus with the same headline clockspeed for so long. I even went through three upgrades (P4-1.8A, A64 3000+ Venice, C2D E4300) all at the same clockspeed of 1.8ghz, that's when I started to notice things were starting to plateau on that front. A far cry from previous upgrades which had always seen my clockspeed more than double (650mhz, 300mhz, 133mhz etc).
So is it some sort of technical limitation with heat dissipation or what? Just a question of manufacturers prefering to pile on more cores and getting better efficiency from that? I mean looking back to what I would have projected back in the day, by 2011 I'd have been expecting to be running a 5-digit clockspeed.