- Joined
- Feb 8, 2009
- Location
- Atlanta, GA
I did a naive back-of-the-envelope calculation last night. Light travels at about 3*10^8 meters/sec, so in one 3-billionth of a second, that's about 10cm. An i7-3930k is about 2cm on a side. Now I'm not sure what is the propagation speed of a voltage change through all of those silicon gates, but ethernet cable propagates a signal at about 65% of light speed, and I'm guessing it's lower than that. From this perspective, it's amazing to me that I can clock my i7-3030k to 5GHz.
Are there any experts who can comment on maximum theoretical clock speeds? Does the physical die size simply have to get smaller for overall clock speeds to increase? Is this actually the limiting factor?
Are there any experts who can comment on maximum theoretical clock speeds? Does the physical die size simply have to get smaller for overall clock speeds to increase? Is this actually the limiting factor?