It used to be that when you shrank a transitor you would be able increase clock speeds by default thanks to something called Dennard scaling. That stopped happ

It used to be that when you shrank a transitor you would be able increase clock speeds by default thanks to something called Dennard scaling. That stopped happening in the mid 2000s. Price per transistor, transistor density, and energy efficiency are all continuing to get better exponentially but new semiconductor plants are also going up in price exponentially so more and more companies are dropping out of the race. You can look at the Wikichip page to see how much attrition there's been. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node