They can only get so far with microprocessors. Eventually they will meet the physical limits of what they can do. I wonder what they will do after that?
People said the same things back when 100Mhz was the fastest processor money could buy.
The focus of chip manufacturers has simply turned away from improving throughput and processing speeds by increasing clock speed (which is not always a reliable means of measuring performance) to increasing the amount of cores on a single die. As more applications adopt multi-threaded capabilities that take advantage of multiple processors, performance will increase such that a 10 GHz CPU will be easily outpaced by a 2GHz CPU that runs 10 cores (or more).
Not only that, but you see a lot of examples where a higher-clock rate CPU is easily outpaced by a slower clock rate CPU by virtue of the fact that the "slower" CPU is more efficient (i.e. can process more data) per clock cycle. This is clearly evidenced by the Athlon XP chips when compared to their contemporary Intel equivalents.
Additionally, there's no reason that the die size can't be continually increased to accommodate an ever-growing number of cores. As manufacturing processes continue to evolve, however, newer processes will eventually allow for more cores to fit in the same amount of space that fewer cores did in the past.
