Re:Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
by ace2358 on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @04:53AM
(#30929923)
I don’t think it’s the electrons moving that matter. It’s the electric fields, which in conducting materials, is approaching the speed of light.
The latency you’re thinking of is more related to the speed with which a semiconductor can change from conducting to non-conducting states.
The speed of electrons in a wire with a potential difference across is it is actually quite slow (cm/s or so).
Also, modern chips and electronics aren’t significantly larger in a physical sense, the wires/traces aren’t longer, but the density of transistors has increased.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
Re:Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
by gruturo on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @07:13AM
(#30930748)
The P4-era Intel Netburst pipeline, in order to chase the highest clock speed, at some point (Prescott) degenerated from 20 stages into a 31-stages deep abomination (which would suffer so badly at any branch mispredict).
The pipeline actually has a couple stages called "Drive"... allegedly for allowing signals to propagate between key areas in the CPU.
We could probably make some older generation chip now and run it much faster, but it is easier and more efficient to add lot more chip...