Re: Remember "Bit-Slice" Chips ?

On 12/12/2024 01:32, rbowman wrote:

On Wed, 11 Dec 2024 10:35:59 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

How long have Intel been struggling with 7nm?

 It would be wonderful if '7nm' referred to some real dimension.
 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16823/intel-accelerated-offensive-process-
roadmap-updates-to-10nm-7nm-4nm-3nm-20a-18a-packaging-foundry-emib-foveros
 "It is no secret that having "Intel 10nm" being equivalent to "TSMC 7nm",
even though the numbers actually have nothing to do with the physical
implementation, has ground at Intel for a while. A lot of the industry,
for whatever reason, hasn’t learned that these numbers aren’t actually a
physical measurement. They used to be, but when we moved from 2D planar
transistors to 3D FinFET transistors, the numbers became nothing more than
a marketing tool. Despite this, every time there’s an article about the
technology, people get confused. We’ve been talking about it for half a
decade, but the confusion still remains."
 The full article is worth reading.

True, but in the end it is no secret that the need for the best power/speed drives the technology to reduce in size to the level where the graininess of the atomic structure and quantum effects start to impact on its performance...
Which is why the tendency today is to stick to  around 3-4GHz clocks but add more cores and local cache RAM , and security risk style predictive branches.
What may happen is that some new way of coding that demands a massively parallel architecture, rather than the existing one optimised for 'C' - emerges.
So E.g. when searching a data structure, every core gets a little slice of it and gets an overall reduction in search times.
--
"If you don’t read the news paper, you are un-informed. If you read the news paper, you are mis-informed."
Mark Twain