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hweetvpu

We are able to see how the power dissipated grows almost exponentially as the clockspeed increases. Clearly thermal loss begins to step in as we put more transistors in a smaller area and switch them on and off several billion times per second. Probably one of the most important reasons for why the clock speeds have been quite stagnant over the last few years (e.g. very few processors over 4GHz).

connorwa

Why does power consumption increase what appears to be exponentially with frequency when power is supposed to be proportional to frequency?

pdp

@connorwa: I don't think the voltage is kept constant across the x-axis in the graph. Because higher clock frequencies require higher voltages to support the power requirement. That's why it isn't linear but sort of proportional to V^2. Please correct me if I am wrong.

slowloris

Does this trend suggest that, unless there is a huge shift in the paradigm of our hardware (like, we start making computers in a completely new way), our ability to process data faster lies in improving how we write software rather than making better hardware?

nate

@slowloris: it seems so, but there is also an incredible amount of research into "making better hardware" that goes beyond making a chip that can run at a greater frequency; just as software developers are getting more comfortable and more adept at writing programs that can scale in parallel, hardware developers have just as much work developing processors that can grant performance improvements to those more-parallel applications without sacrificing single-core performance (as many applications are still single-core).