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I thought the problem with faster as you go smaller is that smaller pipes leak higher pressure water (electron tunneling), which is why we have divided the pressure into a larger number of small pipes (multi-core).

If we can make higher pressure capable small pipes we could run then all faster. I bet there's billions being invested in solving this problem, but that doesn't mean it's solvable.

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One of the main limitations is actually power, as increasing the frequency increases the power draw. All that power turns into heat, which has to be dissipated. Modern processors already shut off inactive cores and change the frequency of the active cores on the fly depending on the workload to reduce the power draw [1], so it's easier to add performance by adding cores. The problem is that software hasn't quite caught up to take advantage of the added cores.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation

Modern CPU cores are faster than CPU cores from before the "multicore" era. I think we're figuring out how to make CPU cores faster _and_ pack many of them into the same space.

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