Chip advances require fresh ideas, speakers say

Re:Chip advances require fresh ideas, speakers say by matt4077 on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @09:07PM (#16372844)

Your arguments mixes up memory as in DRAM, where the market structure is as described, and memory as in CPU cache, which is something entirely different.

If Intel wants to add more cache, they simply paste the template again. What's limiting on-die caches is the competition for space. Chip yields sink roughly proportional to die size.

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Re:Chip advances require fresh ideas, speakers say by hoopladler on Wednesday February 14, 2018 @04:07PM (#16379364)

What's the reason why they can't make bigger chips? More costly?

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Re:Chip advances require fresh ideas, speakers say by matt4077 on Wednesday February 14, 2018 @08:48PM (#16381313)

Yields of functioning chips quickly drop off when you increase the size, because each single transistor has an independent risk of error. Individual error rates are extremely small, but so the number of possibly failing components is large.

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Re:Chip advances require fresh ideas, speakers say by gizmo686 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @01:41AM (#16382329)

You don't need every transistor to work though. If you can detect when a module has a broken transistor, you can simply disable that module and sell the rest of the chip. Divide the cache into multiple small modules, and it is not a big deal if you have to deactivate one because of a broken transistor. You would probably be deactivating it anyway for market segmentation.

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