Intel on why CPUs still haven't cracked the 10GHz mark

Back in the Pentium 4 NetBurst days, Intel openly talked about processors with frequencies of 10GHz. In reality, the clockspeed of processors is one of the few things that hasn't really changed over the past decade or so. Gains in performance are achieved via architectural improvements, while the maximum clockspeed stays relatively stable. So why have the 10GHz CPUs not come to fruition?

In a blog post on Intel's Developer Zone, Victoria Zhislina explains the issue in-depth, you can read it over here. In the blog post, she takes a look at the various elements that can be tweaked to increase the clockspeed, and why they aren't used to crank up frequencies much higher than they are now.

There is an opinion among experts that increased frequency growth will result in highly significant heat emissions. Others think that you can just turn "a switch" that will increase the frequency – and it will be increased as desired. But there are also strong concerns that the increased frequency will raise the CPU temperature so much that it will cause an actual physical melt down. Note that many CPU manufactures will not allow a meltdown to happen, as the CPU has internal temperature monitors and will shut down the CPU before any catastrophic failure occurs.

This opinion is expressed by computer users and, moreover, it has been proven by overclockers’ successes, as they speed up the processors two and more times as fast, they need to attach as powerful a cooling system as possible.

We should validate that the "switch" mentioned above actually exists, as well as the heat emission problem, but these are just part of the battle for expanding gigahertz.