Why CPU have speed limit of roughly 3GHz?

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Kdar

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I was on interview few days ago. And they asked me why most current CPU don't go over 3GHz in speed.

What do you think would be good answer to this question?
 
cpu's do not have a speed limit, they have a heat/voltage limit

one day there will be 1THz cpu's.

edit: what was your answer?
 
Simplest answer, because of heat.

The faster the CPU the more heat that is produced. AROUND 3 ghz is the limit for stock CPU's because the heat generated from that much energy moving around in the CPU can damage the CPU. Which is why stock usually tops out around 3.4 ghz (P4) because anything more is considered too hot and will lessen the life of the chip. People have overclocked above 4 ghz with custom cooling fans and setups.
 
Basically it comes down to performance gain vs profit. 3ghz is about the limit on performance without losing too much on margins. If you notice, 3ghz has been the standard on the extreme chips from intel for quite a few years now, and instead of pushing the limits on speed, they add extra cores to increase performance.
 
Neat. I stuck with amd until the core2's came out due to prive/performace of intel being so crappy compared to AMF.
 
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