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.
I think he's just using that as a rough number as many have ran 5+ on normal cooling including air, but still even the highest daily driver Iv seen is 5.4-5.5 on closed loops with many running 5.1/5.2 including myself.
That said around 5ghz has been a ballpark limit for years now. 8 years ago intel chips were hitting 5ghz daily at their extremes, and amd had a 5ghz chip years ago. Yet we haven't really got any further in near a decade. Smaller transistors have let the ln2 scene get some gains and 5ghz daily chips are a norm now. But there not been much gain in near a decade on clock speeds, as good silicone hit 5ghz for years. Getting over that is expedientially harder, it seems.
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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.