During a CPU cycle the entire chip needs to stabilize; new voltages come as inputs and some time is required to stabilize the outputs to the correct values, thi

During a CPU cycle the entire chip needs to stabilize; new voltages come as inputs and some time is required to stabilize the outputs to the correct values, this time cannot be lower that size_of_chip/speed_of_light and it is already quite close, but the chip cannot become much smaller as the transistors are already at an atomic scale. Breakthroughs are now architectural, like if someone figured a way to implement a CPU with half as many transistor we could get a ~30% increase in clock frequency