If you Google <why processors not getting faster> you will see Reddit and Quora threads going back to about 2010 covering just this topic. I was going to post a link or two but no one article is perfect. They are all oriented (of course!) toward the Intel 486/Pentium/etc. family but chips is chips, more or less. The same physics applies. So if you wish, do your own Googling.
The detail reasons have been posted by others. Fast cycle time = more power = more heat = big problem on a small piece of real estate. Size (length of electrical signal), heat dissipation and cycle speed work against each other. Processors actually HAVE been getting faster. The chips are getting faster not in terms of cycle speed but rather in terms of greater parallelism and new instructions that do more in a single cycle. Same for Intel, by the way. The "new instructions" part is why IBM puts so much emphasis on recompiling (or re-sort-of-compiling with the COBOL ABO) existing COBOL applications. The various "do X on condition" instructions (where X is load, store, etc.) that came along a couple of arch levels ago are a great example. They replace (if you code them in HLASM, or let a compiler generate them) the classic compare/branch/load or store sequence. Branches are a parallelism killer because they make the chip consider two different paths. Conditional instructions are not. The vector instructions are a great example of single instructions that do more with their cycles than their predecessors did. Charles On Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:29:43 -0500, Steve Beaver <[email protected]> wrote: >What I am disappointed in is the CP's have not gone faster than 5.5 Ghz. > >I know the z17 is an evolution, but why have they not gotten faster? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
