Clock Rate - Research

Research

Engineers continue to find new ways to design CPUs that settle a little more quickly or use slightly less energy per transition, pushing back those limits, producing new CPUs that can run at slightly higher clock rates. The ultimate limits to energy per transition are explored in reversible computing, although no reversible computers have yet been implemented.

Engineers continue to find new ways to design CPUs so that they complete more instructions per clock cycle (achieving a lower CPI count), although it may run at the same or a lower clock rate as older CPUs. This is achieved through architectural techniques such as instruction pipelining and out-of-order execution which attempts to exploit instruction level parallelism in the code.