c'mon thats not fair. Sure they havn't delivered on the speed front ..but they overcome it with multicore tech, which in the end means the same thing to the users.
I must admit I've lost track. What is the reason that clock speeds have stalled at 3 GHz? There was some fundamental physics problem happening, but I forget what it was.
Only now the light rays are so close together they get tangled up with quantum effects. So there is this scattering effect, and we can't make the transistors any smaller, because the light is out of focus. The blurry edges caused by quantum dynamics seems to be holding us back.
And yet the latest i7s run circles around the CPUs of that time period, even when running code that is strictly single-threaded.
There have been tons of performance wins made over the last 10 years that aren't just from adding more cores and Intel's predictions were more or less right on the money, if you overlook the marketing mistake common at that time of using ghz as a shorthand for overall chip performance.
It's more a language issue. Parallelism is tricky because of all the unexpected interactions between multiple executions referring to the same data. FP eases that.
The physics problem is heat dissipation. When you double the clock, the heat output increases 4x (IIRC, it's been a long time and, by the time I was graduating, we thought Moore's Law would hit us at 100 MHz).
I'm no expert on this subject but I think Moore's Law is more or less still true, as we are getting more and more cores. Note that Moore's law never stated that clock speed doubles every 18 months. In fact, more transistor can cause a decrease in clock speed because of more gate delays.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_delay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpu#Clock_rate
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Increasing clock speed means increasing power usage, smaller designs means that quantum tunnelling effects increases the probability of electron leakage - requiring even more power, conversely more power makes electrons more likely to leak making cpus less efficient and hotter. performing non reversible computation increases entropy as information is converted to heat, more heat means less efficient and less reliable. So using current materials, more smaller transistors operating at high clock speeds performing non reversible computations means a lot of power and heat. My take is that they are trading away clock speed and keeping smaller sizes and a slightly better more 3d architecture to keep gains up.