Re:Ask HN: What comes after we hit the 16nm barrier?
by swolchok on Monday June 01, 2009 @09:02AM
(#636004)
Well, basic physics -- it already takes nontrivial time for signals to cross the die. If you make the die bigger, you're probably just going to be using that to add more cores, and the time for the furthest-apart cores to communicate is going to grow.
Re:Ask HN: What comes after we hit the 16nm barrier?
by joeyo on Monday June 01, 2009 @12:12PM
(#636288)
Transmission delays suck, but this is something that the brain has evolved to cope with (consider the speed of an action potential vs the speed of electrons in a CPU and the distances between neurons in a typical mammalian brain vs the distances between transistors in a CPU). So I think there there are strategies we could use to deal with larger silicon, but I do agree that there will always be an incentive to keep things as small as possible.
Why not?
And if you can, it doesn't have to be located in your device considering improvements in network technology.