"Dual core technology"

It's funny, until maybe five years ago, they were always promoting clock speed in processors. That was progress, that's how you promoted it. But then at some point they said, in the words of Steve Jobs, "the whole industry has hit a wall" *. Some technical problems were prohibiting them from making the circuit pathways thinner, and thus making the chips faster. Progress in clock speed since then slowed dramatically. I suppose it killed Moore's law. But heck, that lasted over half a century, amazing for any tech prediction.

So then they started to add more cores to devices to make them faster. Parallel processing. Software has to be written for it to be an advantage though. But you never hear any talk of processor speeds these days, it's only number of cores.

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*A year prior he was releasing a new generation Power Macs, and promising that in another year they would come up to so-and-so clock speed. I thought: "don't say that, you idiot. For one thing, it'll make some people refrain from buying the current version, for another thing you can't promise anything like that". Lo and behold, a year later he stood with his hat in his hand, humbly. Well, as humble as Steve ever gets, nothing dramatic... The weird thing is, Steve never talks about future products normally. The one time he elects to do this... bad timing! 


Update: 
Bert said: 

Blame marketing for the confusion. 

For example, did you know that the Core 2 label on Intel processors had nothing to do with dual cores? Seriously! It refers to version 2 of the Core processor architecture. Really. And to be sure that nobody could possibly follow their "logic", they adopted that name just as they were getting ready to release their first mainstream dual core processors, hence the Core 2 Duo, etc. 'nuff said, otherwise I won't be able to remain polite.

Looking at Intel toys, the point where the use of clock frequency as a performance indicator broke down was precisely when the Netburst architecture was abandoned in favor of the Core architecture.

If we make the former a lawnmower mounted under a racing car, then the latter is a harvester. There is no point in comparing the top speed of the two, the racing car will always be faster. But it is the harvester that will get the most work done, especially as it gets wider and wider!

As for Moore's "law", one should refrain to apply it to any one parameter. If you consider only the actual throughput of current processors, it's not dead yet, there's still lots of progress to be made.

Progress follows the path of least resistance, like pretty much anything in nature. All that one can infer from recent developments is that it has become easier lately to improve on internal architecture than continuing the race for faster clock speeds. And once they run out of ideas in that department, there will be some other area to improve.

One can rest assured that we haven't seen the end of the scale in terms of clock speeds either. Be it through new silicon geometries or some other development, the race will resume when the conditions are right.
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