Re:Path to 2 nm May Not Be Worth It
by jcranmer on Monday August 27, 2018 @11:19AM
(#17851994)
> That's because they don't have a real product, and they likely never will.
That was sort of my point; however cool the conceptual architecture is, they've definitely reached the point where they ought to be able to get at least rough comparisons to competitive hardware. That such comparisons are lacking should be taken as a sign that the architecture is too immature to make those claims. I just wish people would stop bringing it up as the magic solution to parallelism, since there's insufficient evidence for those claims.
> That's the biggest problem with Moore's law fizzling out - computer architecture isn't actually that hard, most of the work is just figuring out how to apply the extra transistors you're given. So no matter how specialized you get, you aren't going to get more than 1-2 generations of a chip out of a single semiconductor process, as there is only so much that clever architecture can accomplish.
I've been swayed by the idea that the future of processor technology is essentially accelerator land. You're going to have a few big CPU cores because they're good for code that has no real parallelization potential, but you're going to also have clusters of accelerators that are optimized for different kinds of workloads (such as data-heavy, communication-light workloads that are good for GPGPU).
That was sort of my point; however cool the conceptual architecture is, they've definitely reached the point where they ought to be able to get at least rough comparisons to competitive hardware. That such comparisons are lacking should be taken as a sign that the architecture is too immature to make those claims. I just wish people would stop bringing it up as the magic solution to parallelism, since there's insufficient evidence for those claims.
> That's the biggest problem with Moore's law fizzling out - computer architecture isn't actually that hard, most of the work is just figuring out how to apply the extra transistors you're given. So no matter how specialized you get, you aren't going to get more than 1-2 generations of a chip out of a single semiconductor process, as there is only so much that clever architecture can accomplish.
I've been swayed by the idea that the future of processor technology is essentially accelerator land. You're going to have a few big CPU cores because they're good for code that has no real parallelization potential, but you're going to also have clusters of accelerators that are optimized for different kinds of workloads (such as data-heavy, communication-light workloads that are good for GPGPU).