Skittzo0413
Member
Power efficiency and how high the clocks an architecture can reach are two very different things. Otherwise, we would have seen much higher clocks out of AMD's Polaris cards than we actually did.
The way I understand clock speed of processing components is that the upper limit has to do with thermal constraints, as the component getting too hot would eventually lead to electrical failure. From the fact that a 16nm Maxwell CUDA core can generate the same amount of heat as a 20nm core at a higher clock rate due to its increased power efficiency, it would make sense that it could be clocked higher specifically because of that increased efficiency.
If that's not the case, then what causes the upper limit of a clock rate?