Fast14 looked amazing and it's one of those technologies that seems/seemed so promising. It's a tragedy (for them) that their FastMATH missed the machine learning wave - simply too early!

Alas, with the Apple acquisition nobody else can use it and we don't even know if they use it (but see https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/evidence...)

While Intrinsity claimed powered advantages, I've heard off-hand remarks that it was too power hungry. I speculate that dynamic logic might have mores issues as geometries shrink.

Interesting. Thx.

130nm is nothing to shake a stick at. It may not be able to run Crysis but it should be able to run modern linux and a modern web browser.

I don't know. I don't want to dunk on the effort, but the world has moved on a lot since then.

The "Northwood" Pentium 4 was a 130nm lithography product.

131mm^2 die size, 35x35mm package and a 54W TDP to implement 55M transistors for the 2GHz version; one core, one thread, 32 bits, 256KB of L2 cache.

Apple's A13 Bionic is based on TSMC's 2nd generation 7nm product (this is what's in an iPhone 11).

98.5mm^2 die size, package is scarcely larger, 6W TDP to implement 8.5B transistors with clock speeds up to 2.66GHz; 6 cores for compute; 4 cores for GPU, 64 bits, 4MB of L2 cache.

The Apple product is a system-on-chip design so the comparison is actually worse than that: there's a whole bunch of stuff living elsewhere on the motherboard for Pentium 4 that's on the same die on the A13.

It's difficult to find comparative benchmarks for technologies so far apart in time and application, but there are some SPEC2006 benchmarks for Pentium 4 (a 90nm version with a much faster clock speed and a lot more L2 cache, in a Fujitsu-Siemens workstation from 2005) and A13 (in an iPhone 11).

The iPhone delivers SPECint_2006 = 52.82 / SPECfp_2006 = 65.27; vs the Pentium 4 with SPECint_2006 = 12.3 / SPECfp_2006 = 12.1.

The point is that you can do useful, practical modern computing on a 130nm node. It's obviously not going to compete with flagship 7nm processors, but it's not like you are working with commodore64 level stuff.

You can run modern operating systems on 130nm processors and they will keep up with most everyday tasks. No machine learning, no compiling Firefox, no gaming, but it should be good enough for basic development, browsing the web, checking email, watching 1080p video, etc.

>watching 1080p video

Perhaps with specialized instructions to support decoding. Or a discrete graphics card to do the same.

Many contemporaneous reports show owners of Pentium 4 processors complaining about being unable to manage smooth 720p h.264 playback in software even with 100% CPU utilization; and 1080p was completely non-viable.

So now we have a 50+W TDP processor with a graphics accelerator and it will begin to compete with (if we back away from the bleeding edge 7nm stuff as you suggest) a Raspberry Pi Zero, which costs $15 shipped. I mean, OK, but what's the goal we're chasing here?

The first release of Crysis was 2007. 130nm wasn't too outdated then.

To be fair Crysis ran terribly on the latest hardware when it was released and is still used as a benchmark.