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Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died

#11

Post by mepian »

monocasa wrote: 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…

>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

Around that time the PowerPC 970 aka G5 also failed to achieve 3 GHz, breaking the promise Steve Jobs publicly made at one of his keynotes for Apple.

Re: Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died

#13

Post by mhh__ »

adharmad wrote: post #7
declan_roberts wrote: post #4

> 91 I really hope I live as long as these guys. It's one thing to invent something useful, it's another to spend your life watching it grow.

Roger Penrose is 93 and as sharp as a tack!

Another: Ed Thorpe is similarly old and still going strong, last time I saw.

Re: Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died

#14

Post by senkora »

monocasa wrote: 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…

Now there will be a twinge of sadness whenever I read a paper beginning with “Since the end of Dennard scaling…”.

Re: Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died

#15

Post by martinpw »

monocasa wrote: 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…

> The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture was a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to

I've always been puzzled by this. Did Intel really not see this coming? I remember talking to Intel engineers way back when they were promising 10GHz in the near future - I think the codename at the time was Tejas. They seemed very confident. The architecture must have already been planned out - and yet it seems from the outside like the end of Dennard scaling was a total surprise to them?

Re: Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died

#16

Post by throwup238 »

martinpw wrote: post #15
monocasa wrote: 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…

> The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture was a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to I've always been puzzled by this. Did Intel really not see this coming? I remember talking to Intel engineers way back when they were promising 10GHz in the near future - I think the codename at the time was Tejas. They seemed very confident. The architecture must have already been planned out -…

Intel (and almost everyone else tbh) didn’t fully appreciate how Denard scaling would play out at smaller nodes. They expected to keep lowering the transistor threshold voltage alongside transistor size but that became increasingly difficult due to leakage currents.
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