As transistors shrink, power density stays constant, so smaller chips run faster at the same power.
Held from 1974 until roughly 2005, when leakage current stopped shrinking. Its end is why clock speeds stalled near 3 GHz and chipmakers moved to multiple cores instead.
In practice
- A laptop from 2005 and one from 2015 run at similar clock speeds, and the second has eight cores.
- A phone released a decade after another is not faster per instruction so much as more parallel and more efficient per joule.
- Standing
- Broke down around 2005, ending easy clock-speed gains and forcing multicore designs.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Technology & Software
- Essay
- The curves, the limits and the laws of software