| Soleron said: Not on CMOS they aren't. Silicon CMOS will be used for the next 5-10 years regardless of what you read about, it's too expensive to make other technologies work at present. I can say this because Intel's roadmap goes to 11nm in ~5 years time. |
That's why I said that: "new technologies and techniques are always being discovered which can improve how quickly a transister switches and the frequencies that they operate at."
You cannot expect technology to stand still.
| Soleron said: There have been no desktop CPUs with reasonable thermals (i.e. <=130W TDP) that have gone above 4.5GHz yet. It has been stagnant for years ever since the Pentium 4 3.8GHz that was 7 years ago. That is why I'm saying 5GHz limit. It's a heat/power issue not a tech one.
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The Pentium 4 is probably a bad example of this.
However, you also have to Remember that the Pentium 4 started off at 1.3ghz and scaled up to 3.8ghz on the same Architecture (Netburst.)
That's more than a doubling in clock speed.
Take the first Pentium 4 revision, the Willematte on the 180nm fabrication process, that wen't from 1.3ghz to 2ghz.
Then the second revision was released on the 130nm fabrication process, aka. The Northwood; which scaled from 1.6ghz to 3.4ghz while staying in the same TDP.
Then the Prescott on the 90nm fabrication process wen't from 2.4ghz to 3.8ghz.
The Tualatin didn't scale very well in clock speeds despite being built on the same fabrication process as the Northwood, (130nm)
The thing to take note of is that, the Prescott did have it's pipelines increased and additional cache added and the architecture just simply didn't scale as well as Intel had hoped.
However... After the Pentium 4, Intel and AMD began to use the TDP and transister budget to increase core counts and not to increase the clock speeds as seen with the Pentium D and the Athlon x2 series.
They also took a different design approach and instead of building a processor then ramping up the speeds... They now build it from the opposite end of the scale, they target a frequency then go downwards. If yields are great then they have room to move upwards.
You also have to keep in mind that... Adding more cores consumes more power which can keep clock speeds low.
I can disable 7 cores on my AMD FX processor and break past the 5ghz barrier on air. But with all 8 cores enabled, I can only hit 4.8ghz.
So that is partially the reason on why clock speeds haven't been increasing as rapidly in the past.
| Soleron said:
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Yes it will, it all comes down to leakage.
As you go smaller in the fabrication process, the harder it is to prevent leakage.
Now the vast majority of leakage creates heat, heat drives up the TDP of a processor which can hamper the amount of cores and/or clock speeds of a processor.
Intel's roadmaps might not show a clock speed improvement, but I bet the overclockers will have allot of fun with it, just like how the AMD FX series has no clock speed improvement over the Phenom 2's, but hell it overclocks like no chip before it.
Remember, with less leakage you can go two ways: Higher clocks or lower voltages.
| Soleron said:
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Hardware or Processor development in General? 6 Years isn't that long either way.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
