Growth in processor speed

[bob]

You recall how processor speeds shot up fast back then. I watched clock rates climb from megahertz ranges into gigahertz territory over just a decade. Transistor counts exploded and that pushed raw performance higher every cycle. But power draw started biting hard once densities grew too thick. You notice the shift when single core boosts hit walls around early two thousands. Heat piled up and cooling costs soared beyond reason. Engineers turned toward wider pipelines instead of pure frequency hikes. I remember reading about those early attempts to squeeze more instructions per tick. Performance kept scaling though because architects reworked execution units constantly. Your junior role might see this in benchmarks where old chips lag despite similar clocks.
Moore patterns drove the whole thing forward without pause for years. Fabrication nodes shrank and electrons moved quicker through smaller gates. I saw speeds double repeatedly until physics intervened with leakage currents. You get why Dennard scaling broke down when voltages refused to drop further. Parallel execution took over as the new path since raw hertz stalled. Cores multiplied on dies and workloads spread across them for gains. Yet software had to adapt or gains vanished in thread overheads. I think cache hierarchies grew massive to feed those hungry cores without stalls. Branch predictors evolved into complex beasts that guessed flows better than before. Your projects probably hit these limits when optimizing loops for modern silicon. Out of order execution helped hide latencies but added silicon bloat.
Speeds plateaued around four gigahertz for many lines after that. I recall voltage scaling stopped cooperating and thermal envelopes capped boosts. Architects chased instructions per cycle instead and that yielded steady lifts. You observe how vector units widened to handle more data chunks simultaneously. Fabrication kept advancing but frequency curves flattened noticeably. Power walls forced smarter scheduling across heterogeneous cores on chips. Perhaps interconnects between cores became bottlenecks in bigger designs. I noticed memory bandwidth struggles grew as processors outpaced dram speeds. Speculative execution tricks boosted averages but security holes emerged later. Your code runs faster now due to these layered improvements over decades. Fabrication yields improved enough to pack more features without cost spikes.
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