The energy consumed is cv^2f. It makes no sense to keep increasing frequency as you make power way worse.

Like any doubling rule, the buck has to stop somewhere. Higher energy usage + smaller geometry means much more exotic analog physics to worry about in chips. I’m not a silicon engineer by any means but I’d expect 10Ghz cycles will be optical or very exotically cooled or not coming at us at all.

What would be the benefit? You don't need a 10GHz processor to browse the web, or edit a spreadsheet, and in any case things like that are already multi-threaded.

The current direction of adding more cores makes more sense, since this is really what CPU intensive programs generally need - more parallelism.

None for normal.compute, since energy density is still fundamental. But the interesting option is cryogenic computing, which can have zero switching energy, and 10s of GHz clock rates

Some neat startups to watch for in this space.

I bought a car radiator and dremeled out my case, visited Home Depot for all the tubes and connectors. It’s too easy nowadays to add watercooling

"The era of exponentially rising clock speeds" was already over in 2003, when the 130-nm Pentium 4 reached 3.2GHz.

All the later CMOS fabrication processes, starting with the 90-nm process (in 2004), have provided only very small improvements in the clock frequency, so that now, 23 years later after 2003, the desktop CPUs have not reached a double clock frequency yet.

In the history of computers, the decade with the highest rate of clock frequency increase has been 1993 to 2003, during which the clock frequency has increased from 67 MHz in 1993 in the first Pentium, up to 3.2 GHz in the last Northwood Pentium 4. So the clock frequency had increased almost 50 times during that decade.

For comparison, in the previous decade, 1983 to 1993, the clock frequency in mass-produced CPUs had increased only around 5 times, i.e. at a rate about 10 times slower than in the next decade.

On the plus side, the 486DX-33 didn’t require active cooling. The second half of the 1990s was when home computing started to become noisy, and the art of trying to build silent PCs began.

SSDs were such a revolution though, and a really rewarding upgrade. I'd fit SSDs to friend and family computers as an upgrade.

> The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time.

About a week ago, completely out of the blue, YouTube recommended this old gem to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jQZxH7NgM

A Pentium 4, overclocked to 5GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling.

Watching this was such an amazing throwback. I remember clearly the last time I saw it, which was when an excited friend showed it to me on a PC at our schools library. A year or so before YouTube even existed.

By late 2005, my Pentium 4 Prescott at home had some 3.6GHz without overclocking, 4GHz models for the consumer market were already announced (but plagued by delays), but surely 10GHz was "just a few more years away".

> Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.

"Bananas" core-counts gave me the same experience. Some year ago I moved to Ryzen Threadripper and experienced similar "Wow, compiling this project is now 4x faster" or "processing this TBs of data is now 8x faster", but of course it's very specific to specific workloads where concurrency and parallism is thought of from the ground up, not a general 2x speed up in everything.

GPUs for 3d graphics were a game changer.

I can see why you wouldn’t consider it as impactful if you weren’t into gaming at the time.

There was a time where increased clock speeds, or more generally increased processor throughput was important. I can remember when computers were slow, even for things like browsing the web (and not just because internet connection speeds were slow), and paying more for a new faster computer made sense. I think this time period may well have lasted roughly until the "GHz era" or thereabouts, after which even the cheapest, slowest, computers were all that anybody really needed, except for gamers where the the solution was a faster graphics card (which eventually lead to GPU-computing and the current AI revolution!)

In terms of marketing, the "GHz" barrier was special, because surpassing it has indeed created a lot of recognition in the general public for the fact that the AMD Athlon CPUs were better than the Intel Pentium III CPUs.

In reality, of course what you say is true and the fact that Athlon could previde a few extra hundreds of MHz in the clock frequency was not decisive.

Athlon had many improvements in microarchitecture in comparison with Pentium III, which ensured a much better performance even at equal clock frequency. For instance, Athlon was the first x86 CPU that was able to do both a floating-point multiplication and a floating-point addition in a single clock cycle. Pentium III, like all previous Intel Pentium CPUs required 2 clock cycles for this pair of operations.

This much better floating-point performance of Athlon vs. Intel contrasted with the previous generation, where AMD K6 had competitive integer performance with Intel, but its floating-point performance was well below that of the various Intel Pentium models (which had hurt its performance in some games).