Why cant we attach voltage to decimals to make computers faster?
Answers
Answer:
You can, up to a point.
As the clock speeds up, the time between clocks becomes shorter. At some point, the logic (ands, ors, invert, memory cells, wires) are simply not fast enough to finish their work before the next clock. If you try to run the clock faster than that, the CPU will just not work (if you are lucky) or give wrong answers (if you are unlucky).
To some extent, you can speed up the logic by cooling it down or by turning up the voltage. Too much cooling risks breaking connections which become brittle, and too much voltage risks overheating .
Running the CPU too close to the limits of what the logic can do risks subtle errors, general flakiness, and random crashes.
Speeding up the clock while supplying extra cooling and more voltage is called overclocking, and it does work, up to a point.
Many cheaper CPUs have the clock more or less hardwired, so you cannot adjust it. Mostly you have to pay extra to get an unlocked CPU that you can overclock.
Sometimes the real limit is power rather than logic speed. Many CPUs will run in “turbo mode” a fair amount faster than normal provided that not too many cores are doing that at once and provided that temperatures don’t climb too high.