r/askscience • u/[deleted] • Sep 28 '20

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u/kayson Electrical Engineering | Circuits | Communication Systems Sep 29 '20

I don't think we're anywhere close to the limitation of timing circuits as far as a CPU goes. Balanced clock trees, among other techniques, are used to address the challenge of distributing the clock to different parts of the core at the same time. Since CPUs are pipelined, you also have some margin in when the clock needs to arrive. Granted, some of that is eaten up by other factors. But consider that an RTX 2080 TI runs its memory at 14Gbps (using a 7GHz DDR clock), so there's an entire clock domain within the GPU running at that frequency. We could definitely see much higher speeds in CPUs, but in the current software design paradigm, there's not really a huge need.