Computing · 2005
Multi-core processors
When clock speeds stalled, chips gained more cores.
With Dennard scaling ending, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 and Intel's Pentium D put two cores on one chip. Parallelism became the main source of performance growth.
What it built on 1
What it led to 2
Related measurements
The dashed line marks when it first worked.
Transistors per microprocessor Latest: 58.2B transistors (2021) Source: Our World in Data
Fastest supercomputer Latest: 1.81B GFLOP/s (2025) Source: Our World in Data