Yeah, a lot of engineering talent went into supporting faster and faster clocks. I linked to an Intel presentation from 2005 that discusses their clock circuitr

Yeah, a lot of engineering talent went into supporting faster and faster clocks. I linked to an Intel presentation from 2005 that discusses their clock circuitry in detail, and it's complicated. The slide on page 2 is interesting: it shows desktop clock frequency going up exponentially in a nice straight line from 1985 to 2003, looking to hit 10 GHz in 2005 and keep going. Of course that didn't happen at all, and clock speeds have been essentially flat since then. It's surprising how wrong this graph was at predicting the future. Link: https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/ClockingInMicroprocessorsLecture2005-final.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/ClockingInMic...