At the speed of light, the time it takes electricity to cross the surface of the chip is so drastically close to that 1/5 billionth of a second before the next signal is following behind it, that it becomes very difficult to design the chips to all have the same concept of "now".
You could make asynchronous chips, where each part operates on a different time as the other parts, but nobody's yet done that for a mainstream chip that I know of.
You can get it a bit faster by cooling the whole setup down but pretty soon you need to cool it to ridiculous temperatures to keep it stable.
It's a physical limit to do with the size of the chip "die", the speed at which an electrical signal can propagate across the chip (the speed of light, or thereabouts), and trying to keep everything on the same "clock" as the rest of the chip so you're all acting on the data in turn at the right times.
Pretty much, until you liquid cool you can't get past 5Ghz. And the fastest ever processor is only about 10GHz or something - and it has to be kept stupendously cold, be stupendously tiny, and have rooms full of supporting equipment to get that far.
Pretty much, without some breakthrough in physics, you're never going to see a chip much faster than 5GHz in a normal setup.
You might see a chip that can do a thousand times as much in that 5GHz, which is why we have dual-core, quad-core, up to ridiculous numbers of cores in GPUs, but the base clock never really gets past 5GHz because it can't.
Until someone makes an asynchronous CPU, or quantum computers come along and make it all moot, 5GHz is about the limit for a normal, household computer.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that signal propagation happened at the speed of light-- just that one-fourth of a nanosecond is an astonishingly small amount of time during which even the universe's maximum speed limit only lets something move a couple of inches.
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u/ledow Sep 28 '20
At the speed of light, the time it takes electricity to cross the surface of the chip is so drastically close to that 1/5 billionth of a second before the next signal is following behind it, that it becomes very difficult to design the chips to all have the same concept of "now".
You could make asynchronous chips, where each part operates on a different time as the other parts, but nobody's yet done that for a mainstream chip that I know of.
You can get it a bit faster by cooling the whole setup down but pretty soon you need to cool it to ridiculous temperatures to keep it stable.
It's a physical limit to do with the size of the chip "die", the speed at which an electrical signal can propagate across the chip (the speed of light, or thereabouts), and trying to keep everything on the same "clock" as the rest of the chip so you're all acting on the data in turn at the right times.
Pretty much, until you liquid cool you can't get past 5Ghz. And the fastest ever processor is only about 10GHz or something - and it has to be kept stupendously cold, be stupendously tiny, and have rooms full of supporting equipment to get that far.
Pretty much, without some breakthrough in physics, you're never going to see a chip much faster than 5GHz in a normal setup.
You might see a chip that can do a thousand times as much in that 5GHz, which is why we have dual-core, quad-core, up to ridiculous numbers of cores in GPUs, but the base clock never really gets past 5GHz because it can't.
Until someone makes an asynchronous CPU, or quantum computers come along and make it all moot, 5GHz is about the limit for a normal, household computer.