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What is the CMOS speed trap?

• hga 17y ago
  That's my term for how the Pentium 4 Netburst "marchitecture" hit an unexpected dead end. Externally they said they'd push it to 10GHz, I've heard that internally they expected at least 5GHz, but they were only able to push it to 3.8GHz (and more often 3.6GHz; 8GHz if you used liquid nitrogen cooling as reported by some overclockers). Heat dissipation scaled in a way they didn't expect and this forced a return to the wider Pentium Pro architecture approach (one AMD never left). If you look at Intel's current processors (at least on the Wikipedia lists) you'll see they tend to run between 2GHz to 3GHz, with only a few at the latter and above, with none more than 3.3GHz. Their future roadmap doesn't top 3.6GHz.