> For most users, a single core CPU running at 30GHz would appear faster than 32 cores running at 2GHz. This is not certain except for single threaded programs

> For most users, a single core CPU running at 30GHz would appear faster than 32 cores running at 2GHz. This is not certain except for single threaded programs not accessing main memory, for which this claim is trivial and mostly academic. It is well-known that increase of frequency of CPU by a factor of k does not always result in equal factor k for increase of performance, mainly because of memory access speed not increasing in the same way. "Appear faster" depends on instruction translation, exploitation of paralelism and memory access speed getting faster in some commensurate way, and nobody has yet built a machine doing those all those things at close to 30GHz to see how fast they are. It's possible that while very small CPU can possibly run at 30GHz, other bigger and more distant ingredients can't, e.g. main memory (heat and frequency causing too many errors to be practical). Already the present-day CPUs are too fast for the main memory they use. In intensive data processing, often CPU wastes most of the time waiting for memory. Making it wait faster won't help performance.