Nothing can't travel faster than the speed of light – including Electric current. So in a hypothetic 5 gigahertz CPU, there couldn't be a path through the wires/transistors longer than 5.99584916 – otherwise, the end result couldn't be correctly determined. That's why CPU's got smaller and smaller. But since the transistor shrinking slows down, and Adders/Multiplyer/Register/Decoding Logic etc. all takes some time and length, it's harder to make a CPU with a shorter longest path.