80 years ago, the aircraft industry was struggling to produce 300-hp engines. 20 years later 3000-hp engines were common, and there is even one 15,000-hp engine used on a Russian aircraft. The 4 GHz barrier is a temporary one and it will take much less than 20 yrs to break that barrier.
I have no access to the internal policies of Intel or AMD, but I am sure that Intel has abandoned the 4 GHz processor only for the immediate future. Intel has finally admitted that clock speed is not the be-all and end-all, but other optimisations PLUS a high clock speed is still very desireable.
Heat is wasted energy (except where the primary object is heating). An audio amplifier has about 50% efficiency, meaning that about half of the consumed power goes to the speakers to be converted to sound, while the other half is wasted as heat and has to be dissipated. The theoretical maximum efficiency of an analogue audio amplifier is 78%, and a very efficient practical design may have an efficiency of 65%, wasting only 35%, so that much less heat has to be dissipated.
One direction the CPU manufacturers can take is to waste as little energy as possible at the same clock speed.
To carry the analogy further, a switched-mode audio amplifier can have an efficiency of upto 90% so that only 10% is wasted as heat, requiring MUCH less cooling.
theraven said:
a computer the size of a room should be enuff to keep the temperatures down i think
"My" first computer was an IBM mainframe whose memory banks alone took up space the size of a small office !
