Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. It is not just thermals but also memory latency. If you have four cores and each has two register files you can get 8x the bandwidth at the same latency. That 10GHz talk was a lie on the part of Intel to intimidate people away from AMD, not only would a 10GHZ P4 melt down, but it would be stalled all the time from memory latency. So many things did not work that it was not an honest mistake. Today there is talk…
>Today there is talk of a big clock rate bump (to 200 GHZ or so) if they go to a different semiconductor, but at that point you probably need a fiber optic or terahertz wave link to memory to keep the pipeline full. You talk as if there couldn't possibly be a benefit to an increase in speed without a corresponding increase in memory bandwidth. Whilst it wouldn't be an optimally efficient system, if we /could/ bump to…
Most of the market is for things that are generalizable; maybe you could make some kind of hyper-DSP for millimeter wave base stations or something like that, but you have to spread out the development cost across a low number of units.