Remember how things used to be before the Conway-Mead revolution?
The evolution towards higher speeds has now reached a limit. The physical limitations of the photolithographic process, used today, limit the precision with which zones can be defined on the silicon. This limits, in turn, switching efficiency, As a result, the current limit in the execution speed oftypical instruction is of the order of 1 microsecond. A new process has been developed now, the electron beam process, which will result in higher speed by providing finer resolution. Whenever it becomes operational, or when some other process will be sufficiently refined, this search towards higher speed will resume.
Source: page 390 of the second edition, from 1977, of Microprocessors, from Chips to Systems by Rodnay Zaks.
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