Why processors arent getting faster

It sounds quite simple, but the way down the nanometer scale is very complicated. Increased frequency depends heavily on the current level of technology and advances cannot move beyond these physical limitations," Zhislina says. Even so, there are constant efforts to achieve this very thing, and as a result we see a gradual increase in core CPU frequencies.

There's plenty more to digest. If you have some spare time, hit the blog and give it a read. Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators only one of those is true.

Paul Lilly. Now, it seems that even high-end processors have stopped increasing their clock speeds. Intel was once planning to reach a GHz processor, but that remains as out of reach today as it was ten years ago. Why did processor clock speed stop increasing?

Will processor clock speed start increasing again, or has that time passed? This means more transistors can be packed into a processor. Typically this means greater processing power. This principle states that the power needed to run transistors in a particular unit volume stays constant even as the number of transistors increases. Transistors have become so small that Dennard scaling no longer holds.

Transistors shrink, but the power required to run them increases. In any business, time is money. But do you know how much a slow PC can really cost your small business? Not only that, but a slower computer could lead to frustrated employees, making your hardware investment as much of an employee retention issue as a technology issue. Decades of computer shopping have led many people to believe that more RAM is the ultimate solution for improving PC performance.

The more RAM a computer has, the more data it can usually juggle at any given moment. Think of RAM as a workspace: A giant workbench is obviously easier to work at than a tiny tea tray would be. Another critical limit is processing power. The more powerful and updated your processor, the faster your computer can complete its tasks. By getting a more powerful processor, you can help your computer think and work faster. The accuracy of branch prediction has improved with more advanced architectures, reducing the frequency of pipeline flushes caused by misprediction and allowing more instructions to be executed concurrently.

Considering the length of pipelines in today's processors, this is critical to maintaining high performance. With increasing transistor budgets, larger and more effective caches can be embedded in the processor, reducing stalls due to memory access. Memory accesses can require more than cycles to complete on modern systems, so it is important to reduce the need to access main memory as much as possible. Newer processors are better able to take advantage of ILP through more advanced superscalar execution logic and "wider" designs that allow more instructions to be decoded and executed concurrently.

The Haswell architecture can decode four instructions and dispatch 8 micro-operations per clock cycle. Increasing transistor budgets allow more functional units such as integer ALUs to be included in the processor core. Key data structures used in out-of-order and superscalar execution, such as the reservation station, reorder buffer, and register file, are expanded in newer designs, which allows the processor to search a wider window of instructions to exploit their ILP.

This is a major driving force behind performance increases in today's processors. More complex instructions are included in newer processors, and an increasing number of applications use these instructions to enhance performance.

Advances in compiler technology, including improvements in instruction selection and automatic vectorization , enable more effective use of these instructions. This increases throughput by reducing stalls caused by delays in accessing data from other devices.

They detail the changes between architectures, and they're a great resource to understand the x86 architecture. I would recommend that you download the combined volumes 1 through 3C first download link on that page. Volume 1 Chapter 2. Everything said earlier is true, but to a degree. My answer is short: newer generation processors are "faster" primarily because they have bigger and better organized caches.

This is the major factor in computer performance. In short, for most common applications as in SPEC collection , the limiting factor is memory. When a real sustained computation is running, caches are all loaded with data, but every cache miss causes the CPU execution pipe to stall and wait. The problem is that no matter how sophisticated the CPU pipeline is, or better instructions are, the instruction-level parallelism is still pretty limited except some special highly optimized prefetched cases.

Once a critical dependency is found, all parallelism ends in five-ten CPU clocks, while it takes hundreds of CPU clocks to evict a caheline and load a new one from main memory. So the processor waits doing nothing. This whole concept is true for multicores as well. Because they improve how an awful lot Instructions Per each Cycle clock the CPU can do through including higher execution units compute units , for that reason enhancing the IPC, in addition, they reduce cache, ram, decode, fetch latencies, improve out of order operations and branch prediction, after which add more cache while having lower latency.

Higher bandwidth cache. Add new instructions now and again. Clock speeds are only a part of the performance of a CPU, an essential component, but unluckily the method nodes were hitting a wall for the past decade or so, not anything can get beyond five.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why are newer generations of processors faster at the same clock speed?

Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 9 months ago. Active 1 year, 11 months ago. Viewed 14k times. Improve this question. Wow both breakthroughs and david's are great answers I dont know which to pick as correct :P — agz. Also better instruction set and more registers.

They realised that comparability would be broken anyway. For real big improvements of x86 architecture, a new instruction set is needed, but if that was done then it would not be an x86 any more. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. This can be for a large number of reasons: Large caches mean less time wasted waiting for memory. More execution units means less time waiting to start operating on an instruction.