Re:The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in...
by eloff on Monday June 07, 2021 @07:38PM
(#27428778)
This is real, shipping technology.
See 3d nand flash cells, see stacked cache and HBM memory. All the usual characters are working on it. Intel, AMD (TSMC), Samsung.
Cooling is an issue, but there are solutions.
Re:The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in...
by cogman10 on Monday June 07, 2021 @08:35PM
(#27429238)
3d cells for nand aren't the same as 3d CPU cores. Nand is incredibly simple which makes it possible to do things like 3d cells which would otherwise be more complicated.
There's a reason memory can generally beat computational cores to smaller node sizes. It's because highly uniform circuits are much easier to manufacture. A lot of problems present in CPU logic cores (such as cross talk) just aren't present to the same extent in NAND cells.
Re:The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in...
by duck2 on Monday June 07, 2021 @08:55PM
(#27429388)
Maybe stuff like Upmem (many small CPUs embedded into memory) can take off then?
Re:The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in...
by cogman10 on Monday June 07, 2021 @09:45PM
(#27429716)
Possibly, that'd be one of the "major architectural changes" that I mentioned earlier. Things we've simply not tried yet because they are too radically different from the way hardware currently works.
Re:The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in...
by lovemenot on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @09:12AM
(#27434682)
Sorry to have to ask.Could you please show a Wikipedia-like intro to Upmem?
It may be a simple typing problem, but Wikipedia doesn't seem to have it.
Re:The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in...
by duck2 on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @10:46AM
(#27435865)
I found a previous HN submission about them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766283
First, how do you cool such a chip? Sure, you could add a bunch of transistors but the thermal costs per transistor will stay the same. Assuming similar design but adding 20 layers, how would you account for your CPU now consuming 600W?
Second, The tech doesn't exist. The problem we have is that layering chips today is basically growing crystals in a controlled fashion. Defects in lower layers spoil upper layers. Today that's already a problem (CPUs today have ~7 or 8 layers). Can you imagine the problem of 20 or 30 layers?
Who knows, maybe we'll come up with solutions to both problems, but that's a big maybe. My bet is that instead we focus on architecture designs. We revisit old but deemed too expensive concepts like an async CPU.