Frequency ramping was the dominant force in commodity processor performance increases from the mid-1980s until roughly the end of 2004.
The effect of processor frequency on computer speed can be seen by looking at the equation for computer program runtime: where instructions per program is the total instructions being executed in a given program, cycles per instruction is a program-dependent, architecture-dependent average value, and time per cycle is by definition the inverse of processor frequency.
However, power consumption in a chip is given by the equation where P is power consumption, C is the capacitance being switched per clock cycle, V is voltage, and F is the processor frequency (cycles per second).
Increasing processor power consumption led ultimately to Intel's May 2004 cancellation of its Tejas and Jayhawk processors, which is generally cited as the end of frequency scaling as the dominant computer architecture paradigm.
The end of frequency scaling as the dominant cause of processor performance gains has caused an industry-wide shift to parallel computing in the form of multicore processors.