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The slowdown of x86 processor progress was caused by the very slow adoption by Intel of new fab processes. 14nm CPUs came out in 2014, 10nm mobile only (Tiger L

• bcrl 3y ago
  Not really. Clock speeds for CPUs have stagnated because they hit the power wall back in the P4 days. Part of what enabled the relentless clock increased from the 1970s until the early 2000s is that each generation of CPU ran at a substantially lower voltage than the previous generation while being able to use more power. Going from 5 volts to 3.3 volts is a substantial power saving that gives you headroom to increase clock speed, but going from 1.1V to 1.05V is not nearly as much of an improvement. Once CPUs started dissipating 100-150 watts of power and voltages only drop by a few percent each generation, there's simply no power budget left to increase clocks. Current cores can run at upwards of 7 GHz (just look at the overclocking records) with liquid nitrogen cooling to dump the power increase, but virtually nobody will use such a system in the real world. The reason we see increasing core counts is that 2 cores consume roughly 2x the power of 1 core (well, slightly more). Doubling clock speed from 5 GHz to 10 GHz would cost way more than 2x the power. Furthermore, pumping that much heat out of a sub-100mm^2 die gets harder and harder. You can have more transistors in a small space, but you simply can't have them change state much more than the previous generation did.