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Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died

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Re: Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died

#6
This is the Dennard of Dennard Scaling, a chip scaling law that is arguably as important as Moore's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture was a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to, why the Cell processor never hit the 5Ghz it was supposed to, why we've been spending quite a bit of the transistor budget on more cores rather than a very fancy single CPU core of 10Bs of transistors, and why chips with lower thermal limits will see a lot of "dead silicon" where you can't actually light up the whole chip at once without melting it.

Re: Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died

#8
post #6

This is the Dennard of Dennard Scaling, a chip scaling law that is arguably as important as Moore's Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture was a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to, why the Cell processor never hit the 5Ghz it was supposed to, why we've been spending quite a bit of the transistor budget on more cores rather tha…

Dennard scaling, for people in the industry, was far more important than Moore's law when it was available.

Moore made a high-level observation, but Dennard told you how to do it.

Re: Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died

#10
post #6

This is the Dennard of Dennard Scaling, a chip scaling law that is arguably as important as Moore's Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture was a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to, why the Cell processor never hit the 5Ghz it was supposed to, why we've been spending quite a bit of the transistor budget on more cores rather tha…

Well, it's basically the technical implementation of Moore's law, since Moore's law is just an empirical observation. (And maybe also a self-fulfilling prophecy)
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