Is CPU design hitting a (soft) speed limit?

leecommamichael1 pts0 comments

I m not in the hardware industry, and am curious what the future might hold.We ve been stuck in the 3-5 Ghz range for a long time. I think we re scaling by adding cache, cores, and specialized instructions. Due to observations like Amdahl s Law, PC hobbyists aren t seeing great returns on new machines. We ve had 8+ logical cores for a long time now.The physical size of gates in the CPU is getting very difficult and costly for companies to shrink further. We are approaching a scale where more quantum effects are at play, and there is actually a minimum scale for transistors. So where can we go from here? What will the effects of these changes (or lack thereof) be on software development?

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