Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable...
by MobiusHorizons on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @08:54PM
(#25054715)
I am sure there are many factors, but the most basic one is that the more memory you have, the longer it takes to address that memory. I think it scales with the log of the ram size, which is linearly with the number of address bits.
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Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable...
by psykotic on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @10:18PM
(#25055144)
Log-depth circuits are a useful abstraction but the constraints of laying out circuits in physical space imposes a delay scaling limit of O(n^(1/2)) for planar circuits (with a bounded number of layers) and O(n^(1/3)) for 3D circuits. The problem should be familiar to anyone who's drawn a binary tree on paper.
Re:Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable...
by Dylan16807 on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @05:29AM
(#25057205)
With densities so high, and circuit boards so small (when they want to be), that factor isn't very important here.
We regularly use chips with an L3 latency around 10 nanoseconds, going distances of about 1.5 centimeters. You can only blame a small fraction of a nanosecond on the propagation delays there. And let's say we wanted to expand sideways, with only a 1 or 2 nanosecond budget for propagation delays. With a relatively pessimistic assumption of signals going half the speed of light, that's a diameter of 15cm or 30cm to fit our SRAM into. That's enormous.