Processor design goals: Are chip designers always focused primarily on increasing clock frequency, regardless of other considerations such as power, parallelism, or IPC?

Introduction / Context:
Clock speed (MHz/GHz) is only one factor in processor performance. Architects balance frequency with instructions per cycle (IPC), core count, cache hierarchy, memory bandwidth, specialized accelerators, and power/thermal constraints. This question tests conceptual understanding that “more GHz” is not the sole or always the primary design goal.

Given Data / Assumptions:

• Modern chips face power density and thermal limits.
• Workloads benefit from wider superscalar pipelines, out-of-order execution, vector units, and multiple cores.
• Energy efficiency (performance per watt) is often a dominant metric.

Concept / Approach:
After the breakdown of Dennard scaling, raising frequency dramatically increases power (roughly proportional to V^2 * f). Designers therefore pursue IPC improvements, parallelism (multi-core, GPU, DSP, NPU), and domain-specific accelerators. For many applications, total throughput and energy efficiency outweigh raw clock speed.

Step-by-Step Solution:

Verification / Alternative check:
Compare processors across generations: some newer chips run at similar frequencies but deliver higher performance through IPC, more cores, and larger caches, demonstrating that GHz alone is not the strategy.

Why Other Options Are Wrong:

• “Higher GHz is always the sole objective” ignores practical power/thermal constraints.
• Mobile/server-only statements are incorrect; the trade-offs apply across domains.
• Historical claims (e.g., “only before 2000”) are oversimplified.

Common Pitfalls:
Equating clock speed with user-experienced performance; overlooking workload characteristics and bottlenecks like memory latency; ignoring the efficiency benefits of accelerators and vectorization.

Final Answer:
Incorrect: performance also comes from IPC, parallelism, and efficiency