Comment by bee_rider

I sometimes drop by cpu down to the 400Mhz-800Mhz range. 400 is rough. 800, not so bad. It runs fine, with something like i3 or sway.

If we really got stuck in the hundreds of MHz range, I guess we’d see many-core designs coming to consumers earlier. Could have been an interesting world.

Although, I think it would mostly be impossible. Or maybe we’re in that universe already. If you are getting efficiency but not speed, you can always add parallelism. One form of parallelism is pipelining. We’re at like 20 pipeline stages nowadays, right? So in the ideal case if we weren’t able to parallelize in that dimension we’d be at something like 6Ghz/20=300Mhz. That’s pretty hand-wavey, but maybe it is a fun framing.