In fact these strategies work best when you turn back the clock speed. Architectural features, like bigger caches, more and deeper pipelines, and branch prediction units, have improved performance at least as much as clock speed.
We’ve got a few generations before we have to worry about physical constraints. We’re doing 65 nanometer now, and feature sizes quite a bit smaller than that are in the lab. New generations aren’t coming out quite as fast as old ones, but that is purely an economic, not technological issue. Mask costs are gigantic and accelerating. To make a new ASIC, say, at those feature sizes, you need to have enough functionality to cram into it, and enough volume to make up for the mask costs. That’s getting harder and harder.
I think the main reason we’re seeing dual core architectures now is design complexity. What do you do with all those transistors? You really can’t afford to design in new features to make use of them, and no one knows what new features would be worth it. We used to increase cache size, an easy way of using transistors, but that runs into diminishing returns. Stamping out multiple cores is a cheap way of using up the transistors, and allows you to simplify the cores and provide better performance without increasing the clock speed much.
I have a hard time seeing how an 80 core processor would do much for a home PC. Graphics processors are inherently parallel now. For transaction processing, maybe.
How many people are actually going to be burning a DVD and CD at the same time for a significant part of the day? I don’t notice much performance degradation when I burn CDs. I’d expect a lot of that would be disk bound. How much of DVD compression is done in the DVD itself, on the DSP in there? I’d assume a lot of the compression technology is proprietary, and not a part of Windows or in the DVD burning utility, but I’m not an expert.
), that causes my system a bit of degredation. Of course I only have a 1 gig and a 512 for RAM, so that could be a part of it.