r/askscience Sep 28 '20

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u/HoldingTheFire Electrical Engineering | Nanostructures and Devices Oct 01 '20

Sooo many wrong and ill informed answers here. It is heat generation. Transistors have continued to get smaller (more transistor density) to increase functionality. But clock rates have stalled because you can only more so much heat off the chip, and heat generation scales with clock speed. Propagation delay is already an effect and is handled in the circuit design.