Sure they are adding more cores but thats because they have made no progress on the clock speed in nearly a decade. Per-core IPC (instructions execut

Sure they are adding more cores but thats because they have made no progress on the clock speed in nearly a decade. Per-core IPC (instructions executed per clock cycle) have soared since then. That's why a modern 4-core Core i7 is roughly 20-30x faster than a "Netburst" Pentium 4 from 10 years ago. Looked at another way, each individual core of a modern i7 is about 5x-7x faster than those old Pentium 4 CPUs. http://ark.intel.com/products/27495/Intel-Pentium-4-Processor-supporting-HT-Technology-2_80-GHz-512K-Cache-800-MHz-FSB http://ark.intel.com/products/27495/Intel-Pentium-4-Processo... FPGA's are going to be the next go to for performance until cpu clock speeds improve Maybe. What would also be cool is decreasing the latency of main memory. That is the current single biggest bottleneck in processors today. A cache miss usually means that the CPU sits around doing nothing for hundreds of cycles while it's waiting for data to be fetched from main memory.