Have computers reached the limit in speed?

The computer industry has been operating by Moore's Law that CPU speed would double during a constant interval. Now we are beginning to push the limit where this is no longer possible. The basic problem is that reducing the size of transistors and putting them closer to increase speed also increases heat output. The limit appears to be around 4 Megahertz and a speed of 5 MZ is now possible only with some serious cooling.


The computer industry has been compensating for the speed limit by using parallel processing, where types of tasks are done by other processors, by using memory and speed more efficiently and by tweaking the programs run on computers.


Some people are even telling us that we really do not need faster processor speed as we can not tell difference - i.e. we can only react so fast. This may be sour grapes or maybe true.


There is one area where computing still needs to be improved and that is voice recognition. When computers get fast enough and accurate enough to recognize and generate speech, that will be a new day.