PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon — AMD hit marketing gold with its 1 GHz Athlon, beat Intel by a nose

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www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/pc-proc…

Consumer PCs have long abandoned the multi-GHz race for core count and NPU inflation.

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Isnt it that at some point the GHz just aren’t useful anymore or rather not physically possible. I think they abandoned it for a good reason.

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OP edited

I think there are two parts to this. There are factors beyond clock rate; clock rate alone doesn’t give a full picture. Going from say 166 MHz to 1 GHz brings radical performance improvements without too many drawbacks, once you go above 3-4 GHz, the marginal increase in clock rates becomes increasingly expensive in terms of heat management.

EDIT: Didn’t realize there was difference between mHz and MHz.

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Watch out for your prefixes, 166 mHz would be one operation every 6 seconds.
I don’t think there ever has been a CPU that slow ;-)

(small letter “g” doesn’t exist as a prefix, but could be easily confused as the unit gram-Hertz)

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I once made an incredibly limited cpu on paper, basically had the whole cpu in logic gate on a piece of paper. Tried to run the most basic programm on it by hand and i can assure you thet it was much slower than 166mhz XD

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You get rate limited by cache. The literal physical distance between cache(3) (tiny ram(s) in the processor) and processor can’t be zero. So those signals must travel over a distance at the speed of conduction. Having multiple processors allows tasks to be done simultaneously, effectively multiplying processing speed.

But more speed is particularly useful with bad/legacy software(single thread). SolidWorks is a good example.

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