[iamaaditya]

Technically it was heat but mostly it was due to (i) Economics, there was less demand for faster clock speed. Otherwise more research could have gone towards solving heat problem. (ii) Each cycle of CPU was more efficient with ability to execute multiple instructions in a single cycle and with more efficient instruction sets.

Surprisingly, power consumption also made huge impact. As tablets and laptops got more popular than desktop battery life became a major concern and thus TDP played major role in research.

Try this fun experiment: Underclock your CPU by half a GHz and see if you notice the difference in your day to day work.

[Cyph0n]

No, it was only because of power density i.e. too much heat dissipated in a really small area. There is no way to "solve" this issue, other than to just throw more cooling at it. And since more cooling = more money, Intel (and friends) went down the multicore route instead.

No amount of R&D spending can bend the laws of physics to overcome the inherent limitations of silicon. I'm sure Intel also looked into alternative semiconductors (e.g., III-V) before giving up on the 10 GHz dream.

[Baeocystin]

Single-thread performance is as important as it has ever been.

That a secretary typing a document or someone who only spends time on facebook doesn't notice the difference is irrelevant- consider, for example, the massive capital outlay by the financial industry to have servers located as closely to the world's trading hubs as possible. If they are willing to pay whatever it takes to shave milliseconds off a round trip, faster CPUs are a part of that equation.

[krylon]

> faster CPUs are a part of that equation.

I think the GP did not debate that but pointed out the for CPU speed/throughput, clock speed is only part of it. Adding functional units and allowing the CPU to process more instructions in parallel can have a big impact, so can e.g. larger cache, better branch prediction and so forth.

If you give people faster CPUs, they will cheer and find something to keep them busy. ;-) And for some people, there is no such thing as "fast enough". But for a fairly large share of desktop/mobile users, the is not the limiting factor as much as memory bandwidth and I/O.

[Baeocystin]

I don't disagree with that statement in a general sense. But what earns Intel its money and marketplace dominance? The cheap Celeron/Pentium-class chips sold in bargain laptops & Best Buy specials? Or the high-end, single-thread performance chips?

[monocasa]

> Otherwise more research could have gone towards solving heat problem. (ii) Each cycle of CPU was more efficient with ability to execute multiple instructions in a single cycle and with more efficient instruction sets.

Dude, Intel spends something like $80B/yr on R&D. This is closer to hitting fundamental laws of physics barriers.

They killed off their P4 line and developed their mobile line for a reason.

[kashkhan]

the $80B a year in R&D is off by an order of magnitude.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/05/intel-corporation-...

[ma2rten]

Isn't an order of magnitude 10x? According to your link they spent $12.74 billion in 2016.

[carlob]

Not necessarily, it could be e if you're using natural logarithms. Anyway: log10(12.74) = 1.10, log10(80) = 1.90. So, it's a little less than a full order of magnitude, but pretty close.

[slededit]

Although not normally used for smaller amounts it can go in both directions. ~1/10th is still an accurate if archaic use of the term.

[knowaveragejoe]

Indeed, that's more than Intel earned in total revenues in 2016...

[szatkus]

I accidentaly underclocked my old CPU (Athlon 651K) to 800MHz and found out after about 2 weeks when I bought The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Other than that it was fine, sometime little slow, but comfortable.