Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Why have computers been stuck at around 3 gigahertz for years now? And where's Pentium 5,6,7 et

Back in the 1990's we went from 100Mhz to about 1.1Ghz. I could easily see the progress computers were making back then. Now, every time I check the latest computers they all top out at around 3.06Ghz. Surely, I MUST be missing something?



Why have computers been stuck at around 3 gigahertz for years now? And where's Pentium 5,6,7 etc?anti virus scan



Well there are physical limitations on how fast a clock signal can be. I think both AMD and Intel realized that you can improve the speed of a CPU without adding more speed to the clock. They are improving on things like true threading of execution and shortening of execution pipes. To prove the point, a 1.5 Ghz Intel Pentium M processor was ''faster'' than a 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4. I don't think you'll see another clock speed jump anytime soon but you will see faster CPUs.



Why have computers been stuck at around 3 gigahertz for years now? And where's Pentium 5,6,7 etc?ariel



Yes, AMD made the jump for 64 bit processors, and Intel is still behind somehow. In the meanwhile, Microsoft came out with XP 64bit, so the trend will go in that direction. Belive me, 3 GHz is too much power for too many applications today...
the Pentium 5 and 6 if you will are the dual core and Pentium extreme processors check out Intel.com for all the info
Newest processors that I have seen being sold are running around 3.7MHz (Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 Presler 1066MHz FSB LGA 775 Processor Model BX80553965). The main reason why in my opinion as why they have not jumped up higher like you were describing is that there has been a lot of development into 64 bit processors verses the standard 32 bit that most systems run on today. The technological jump from moving from 32 to 64 bit processors is light years higher then continuing to make 32 bit processors running at 4-8 Ghz by increasing the allowed RAM for a computer from 4GB today to ''17,179,869,184 gigabytes or 16 exabytes of RAM''!!!!!!!!

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