Only five or six years ago a good chip had two cores and a clock rate of perhaps 2.4 gigahertz. Somehow the chips have been redesigned or improved to allow much

Only five or six years ago a good chip had two cores and a clock rate of perhaps 2.4 gigahertz. Somehow the chips have been redesigned or improved to allow much lower heat loss at clock rates previously considered unreachable without special hardware. (A somewhat recent Intel chip is able to reach 4.4 gigahertz on four cores with air cooling, and AMD has eight-core server chips that produce less heat than older two-core chips.) I do not know how it was done, but apparently the engineers have found ways to improve their designs. Now the chips seem to be more powerful per clock cycle while producing less heat and reaching higher clock rates.