Clock speeds will only double, triple in next 15 years

Actual quotes from the article now that I'm made my little joke:


"All these factors mean a change in the way systems on a chip should be designed, said Rowen. In moving from 180, to 130 to 90 nanometre technology the hardware has only grown by a factor of five, while the software overhead has grown by a factor of 20, Rowen said.

He said that SOCs will be made up of a more diverse design using several cores and chip parts devoted to dedicated tasks. There’s an opportunity to overlap software, hardware and use relatively small development teams to bring chips to market in 18 months or less.

Designing systems using Linux software allows for far less overhead allowing for faster and more optimised systems, he said. New levels of automation allow for processor generations to optimise instructions sets. The ability to auto tune the processor makes the barrier to such approaches go down much further."