Why cant cpu clockspeeds get any faster?

[derek101700]

Why cant cpu clockspeeds get any faster?

And how fast does electricity travel on a modern motherboard (sending and the other end recive the signal)

 

[Mex]

Why cant cpu clockspeeds get any faster?

And how fast does electricity travel on a modern motherboard (sending and the other end recive the signal)

Who said clock speedscan't get faster? If you're talking about the Intel Prescott, the reason they topped out at 3.8GHz was due to heat. A high operating voltage, combined with transistor leakage caused the chips to run too hot. In general, heat is the main enemy of clock speed. However, as processors continue to shrink and improve in design, clock speeds will increase again.

And for your electricity question, I believe that it travels in terms of nanoseconds. (Billionths of a Second)

 

[derek101700]

why cant they make a cpu with core 2 duo archetecture but single core and higher clock speeds?

 

[Mex]

In reality, they could - the overclocking success stories shared by members of this forum show that the Core 2 Duo has a lot of potential.

They will put out a "Core 2 Solo" next year based on the Conroe-L core. However, it will not operate as fast as the high end Conroes will. Why? It's not technical restrictions, it's marketing. Putting out a high-clocked Core 2 Solo might put it in competition with their flagship product, the Core 2 Duo (Though the fact that the Duo is dual-core somewhat voids this issue, but not entirely) . Intel is no stranger to accidentally cannibalizing sales of their high-end products - this happened back when Intel released the Mendocino Celeron.

In addition to market, the industry is experiencing a mass-migration to dual core. Putting out a high-end single core would be a bit backwards.

 

[derek101700]

well yea 2 cores are better than one but i dont even know what to do with with 4 cores is there were any.

hows hyperthreading, are they gonna forget it from the core 2 duo?

 

[sirheck]

as far as electricity. it travels around 186 thousand miles persecond
or is it 286 thousand miles persecound.

 

[Mex]

Hyperthreading was just a stand-in solution for Intel until they released the Pentium D.

Since Intel has true dual-cores now, hyperthreading is no longer needed. Although, it could surface on budget chips if Intel really needed it. Hyperthreading is dead on dual-core CPUs; for single-cores, it might still serve a purpopse, but otherwise, its dead.

 

[jaguarskx]

And how fast does electricity travel on a modern motherboard (sending and the other end recive the signal)

Basically speaking, electricty travels at the speed of light or very, very close to it since an electron has mass.

If the speed of light is too slow, then I would love to see your specifications to create a warp field generator so that objects can travel faster than the speed of light within a bubble of normal space/time.

 

[jaguarskx]

why cant they make a cpu with core 2 duo archetecture but single core and higher clock speeds?

Intel will be release a single core version of the Core 2 Duo CPU. The codename is Millville. It will have an L2 cache of 1MB which is half that of the Allendale core. Allendale is a dual core CPU with 2MB of L2 cache as opposed to Conroe which has 4MB of L2 cache.

Millville will come out next year and will probably replace the current generation Celeron CPU.

 

[derek101700]

one of the books i read that said a signal travels 1 inches on a motherboard when the cpu cycles once on a 3 ghz (48 000 miles a sec?) ;from the book: hacking the xbox By Andrew "bunnie" huang

 

[jaguarskx]

one of the books i read that said a signal travels 1 inches on a motherboard when the cpu cycles once on a 3 ghz (48 000 miles a sec?) ;from the book: hacking the xbox By Andrew "bunnie" huang

A signal and electricity are two different things. Based on fundamental physics electricity travels near the speed of light.

 

[clue69less]

as far as electricity. it travels around 186 thousand miles persecond or is it 286 thousand miles persecound.

186000 miles per second is the speed of light.

 

[derek101700]

$Love=:lol:


i dont spend alot of money and i dont get/ give love so im not happy

 

[little_scrapper]

as far as electricity. it travels around 186 thousand miles persecond or is it 286 thousand miles persecound.

186000 miles per second is the speed of light.

exactly 186???? are you sure??? I would like to see the calibration certs on the equipment you used to measure it.

 

[sirheck]

well it is 186 thousandmiles persecond

look it up this is known for years hundreds of them :idea:

 

[angry_ducky]

as far as electricity. it travels around 186 thousand miles persecond or is it 286 thousand miles persecound.

186000 miles per second is the speed of light.

exactly 186???? are you sure??? I would like to see the calibration certs on the equipment you used to measure it.

He used one of those nasty roadside speed cameras :lol:

 

[1Tanker]

as far as electricity. it travels around 186 thousand miles persecond or is it 286 thousand miles persecound.

186000 miles per second is the speed of light.

exactly 186???? are you sure??? I would like to see the calibration certs on the equipment you used to measure it.186,282...IIRC.

 

[1Tanker]

Why cant cpu clockspeeds get any faster?

And how fast does electricity travel on a modern motherboard (sending and the other end recive the signal)

... What you are looking for is what is the drift velocity, though it is actually more complicated than that, overall the drift velocity is dependent on the electron density, current, charge, and potential energy drop that electrons experience when acclerated in an electric field.

The mathematical relationship between drift velocity is very simple really,

vd = uE (vd is the velocity, u is electron mobility, and E is the electric field accelerating the electron).

However, it is not really the signal in the motheboard that you need to address, those technologies have been developed or will be developed shortly. It is in the CPU.

In order to turn the transistor 'on' an electron must travel only 45 nm from source to drain based today's current 90 nm process (for Intel it is about 38-40 nm if they Lg scaled correctly for 65 nm). Operating at a frequency of say 2.4 GHz, a transistor must switch on faster than 1/2.4E9, or 0.42 nanoseconds. As the electron must transverse about 40 nm within 0.42 nanosecond then it must travel at about 95 meters/sec or quite abit slower than the speed of light. (The speed of light is 2.99E9 m/sec)

This is just oddball off the cuff calculations, but the ball park idea is there. 95 meters/sec is quite fast.

However, from the above equation, one can begin to understand why Intel, AMD, etc. are insterested in strain engineering --- strain (or stress as it is often called, incorrectly by the way) changes the mobility. By various processing techniques, process engineers enhance the mobility (via stress/strain) in order to increase the drift velocity of the electrons in the transistor. That is to make the electrons travel faster, switch the transistor on faster, one may simply increase 'u' in the equation above.

Alot of other factors come into play, however, you can also gather from the equation above why Vcore is needed to push clock speeds higher. Why? Well, increasing Vcore essentially increases E (the electric field strengths), thus making the electrons travel through the 'channel' faster. Hence, higher clocking (overclocking) often requires increasing Vcore. This is pretty much known, and understood, but the physics is buried in the equation above.

Or, you could simply ask BaronMatrix, he thinks he is omnipotent.

JackActually, 95meters/sec isn't really very fast...212 m.p.h. I would have thought that the current would travel at least at the speed of sound..~740 m.p.h (331 meters/sec). :?

 

[derek101700]

Wow i have no idea what u are saying, im only 14 dude,

if a cpu produce 10 times less head and 10 times smaller will it make the clock speeds to be 10 times faster?

 

[sirheck]

you have lots to learn young jedi

 

[clue69less]

Actually, 95meters/sec isn't really very fast...212 m.p.h. I would have thought that the current would travel at least at the speed of sound..~740 m.p.h (331 meters/sec). :?

Well, take that electron into a vacuum and put a large potential across a gap and you can accelerate it to very high velocities. As Jack pointed out, as you approach c, the energy required to accelerate further becomes quite large.

 

[jaguarskx]

This is not quite true, an object that carries mass but approaches the speed of light becomes more and more difficult to accelerate. The theoretical limit to this is of course the speed of light, in which case the term 'relativistic mass' tends to infinity. This is quite impossible as the entire universe would expand into an infinite mass if any object of mass went at the speed of light. Thus the theory of relativity would suggest that no object that has mass can travel that fast. Light, itself, is an odd ball because the photon is pure energy which carries momentum but does not have mass... very odd and very difficult to imagine conceptually.

Now, where the conceptual part becomes more difficult is that within the reference frame of the traveling object, the mass actually has remained invariant... so it is almost paradoxical --- think twin paradox. An object traveling away from you with mass would appear to you, if you could measure it, to have gained mass but if you stood on the object traveling with it, then your reference frame is traveling and, as such, the object has not changed mass. This is why it is called special theory of relativity, the observation is relative to the two different frames in which the object and the observer are in. Very confusing

Jack

Since I didn't know the age of the post I decided to provide a simple, yet somewhat inaccruate answer.

Since an electron does have mass, the faster it accelerates the more energy is required. The required energy increases exponentially as the electron or any object approaches the speed of light until an infinite amount of energy is require. Thus, my very simplistic answer that the speed of the electron is "very, very close to the speed of light."

As you've said, a photon is a very curious particle since it is massless. It also have wave-like properties as well which is very odd for a particle.

I wonder if scientists will ever be able to prove the existance of the graviton particle. Which is a hypethetical messenger particle that is also supposedly massless as well.

 

[mitch074]

electricity travels at light speed. Electrons move much more slowly though. However this has little impact on today's processors - maybe it will have some when processors are made with 30°C superconductors (superconductor: a material that can conduct electricity without any form of electrical resistance. Righ now this can be attained on metal at very very VERY low temps).

 

[chuckshissle]

Speed can improved performance on the cpu no doubt but having multiple cores working as one is much better, hence the saying "Two heads are better than one". But increasing speed means more heat which is the other mention the number one enemy of the cpu or any other components. That said with multiple core cpu it can achieve higher performance while maintianing the same temps as single core high speed cpu and running at low voltage and low power consumption. Also programs, games and other softwares are beggining to use the "multi-threaded" execution to better benifit the multi core cpus and increasing performance while running the application.

 

[clue69less]

On graviton, I recall an experiment years ago going up on one of the shuttles to measure such a wave --- they constructed 4 perfectly spherical balls made of silver, spaced them equal distance and measured the relative change in distance and distortion (geometrically from spherical that is). As I recall the experiment was a bust.

The last year has not been kind to evolving theories in physics. Well, that's not true - change can trash existing beliefs and still be good. Anyway, some folks are attempting an extreme facelift for the gravitron. I'll see if I can find that link...

Gravity is even more mysterious than light in my opinion.

You bet. And to think how the community once thought Newton had taken us most of the way to an understanding!