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Electronic microprocessors are limited by the speed of light. Electrical current through the processor travels at the speed of light and that becomes the limiting factor.
The Speed of Light is 29,979,245,800 cm/sec. A 1 GHz Processor can theoretically perform up to 1,000,000,000 instructions/sec. Each processor instruction produces a result in the form of an electrical signal that needs to be stored or delivered somewhere. The time in between consecutive processor instructions becomes the limiting factor since it determines how far the signal produced by the previous instruction can travel at the speed of light. The time in between instructions on a 1 GHz processor is 1/1,000,000,000 sec, if this figure is multiplied by the speed of light we would get a distance of 29.9 cm. This means that no component that interacts directly with the CPU can be at a distance greater than 30 cm for a 1 GHz processor. For a 3 GHz processor the distance is 10 cm.
It seems that we are currently near to the limit of how fast our processors can run. The current "multiple core" trend we are seeing from processor manufacturers seems to support this case. Multiprocessing is currently the most cost effective workaround to acheive improved performance if you cannot go any faster on a single processor.
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In practice it is slowed further by such factors as capacitor charge-discharge times. These may be in fractions of microseconds, but still significant at the circuit's working frequency.
Wiki User
∙ 9y ago
Wiki User
∙ 11y agoTheoretically, processing speed doubles every 18 months so there is no maximum speed. If you want to know about frequencies then I can tell you that most modern processors operate in the 3.0GHz range and above up to 4.2GHz and it doesn't look like that will change for a while.
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The processor (obviously)
What is the minimum and maximum processor speed of motherboard?
50
Whatpart of the computer determines the maximum processor speed?
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What is the approximate theoretic maximum order of bytes that can be downloaded in one minute on a 10Base T network?
Well, 10 refers to the maximum theoretical transmission speed, which is 10 Mbit/s.
What does compute?
The definition of computer is:Also called processor. an electronic device designed to accept data, perform prescribed mathematical and logical operations at high speed, and display the results of these operations.
If clock speed increases then what happens to processor speed?
Th clock speed is the processor speed. It is simply the amout of operations the processor can do per second. However if the processor has multiple cores, it will be as fast as number of cores * clock speed. Note that the processor speed is not the overall computer speed.
What is the speed of USB 2.0?
It doesn't matter what is the speed is on the USB it depends on the computer's speed on its hardrive, internet, or both the speed is not based on the 2.0 USB, is the computer either its old or new or in between.
How is the CPU speed measured an expression?
speed of a processor is measured by CMU(Clock Multiplier Unit). Formula:(speed of processor in Hz)/(FSB of processor)= CMU
