Just a side not that light in other medium than air travels slower. It's not 300k km/h but ~200k km/h in FR4 microstrip (6"/ns where 1ns is equivalent to 1GHz clock).

translated: "Just an aside: note that the speed that light travels in any medium is slower than it travels in vacuum. Its speed is no longer 3e8 m/s, but a third less in, for example, FR-4 microstrip (a popular prototype board dielectric). The effective speed is about 6 inches per ns, or at least, 6 inches per cycle of a 1 GHz clock."

I'm not really sure how that puts things into perspective. I actually have no concept of how fast photons are whizzing around the room.

Takes light 8 minutes to get from the sun to here. (To put it in perspective.)

That's effectively how I see it: as a simple human, I consider light as an instantaneous phenomenon. Its speed seems to be the maximum attainable for about anything, but a man-made processor has the power to execute a simple computation in less time than what it takes for light to travel 9 centimeters. Isn't that impressive? Doesn't that cast doubt on how far we can improve our CPUs? Just remember that a thousand years ago, our beat creations were basically piles of rock.

Pyramids, built over 4 millennium ago, a marvel of accuracy and the highest man made object until the year 1300, would beg to differ.

Unbelievable:

The pyramid remained the tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3,800 years,[8] unsurpassed until the 160-metre-tall (520 ft) spire of Lincoln Cathedral was completed c. 1300. The accuracy of the pyramid's workmanship is such that the four sides of the base have an average error of only 58 millimetres in length.[9] The base is horizontal and flat to within ±15 mm (0.6 in).[10] The sides of the square base are closely aligned to the four cardinal compass points (within four minutes of arc)[11] based on true north, not magnetic north,[12] and the finished base was squared to a mean corner error of only 12 seconds of arc.[13] The completed design dimensions, as suggested by Petrie's survey and subsequent studies, are estimated to have originally been 280 Royal cubits high by 440 Royal cubits long at each of the four sides of its base. The ratio of the perimeter to height of 1760/280 Royal cubits equates to 2π to an accuracy of better than 0.05% (corresponding to the well-known approximation of π as 22/7).

Not much perspective to be had here unless you are assuming a single photon's distance traveled.

The analogy breaks down when you consider thousands or millions/billions of photons traveling simultaneously, then you can measure in miles.

A single photon's travel-distance doesn't mean much in this context.

As far as I know, those 9 centimetres are still the fundamental speed limit for information to travel.

That's really what makes me fear about how far we can push our processors. I don't think Moore's law will hold a lot longer for CPUs, unless we manage to get very good quantum computers very soon.

I think it's a great way to put it in perspective for me at least, light is the fastest thing in the universe it's the ultimate constant for reference. We could measure computation in light-cycles similarly as we do with lightyears for really long distances. I don't get frequencies like I do distances, I think it's because I deal with distances all the time but less so with frequencies.