14th April 2007, 10:03 PM
Well that's the thing. Around the 3 GHZ mark the returns for shrinking down are starting to vanish due to... physics basically. You can only make things so small. We're nearing these limitations and so we need other ways to get dramatic speed increases. Parallel processing is one of those ways.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)