"Unfortunately for John, the branches made a pact with Satan and quantum mechanics [...] In exchange for their last remaining bits of entropy, the branches cast evil spells on future genera- tions of processors. Those evil spells had names like “scaling- induced voltage leaks” and “increasing levels of waste heat” [...] the branches, those vanquished foes from long ago, would have the last laugh."
"John was terrified by the collapse of the parallelism bubble, and he quickly discarded his plans for a 743-core processor that was dubbed The Hydra of Destiny and whose abstract Platonic ideal was briefly the third-best chess player in Gary, Indiana. Clutching a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a shot- gun in the other, John scoured the research literature for ideas that might save his dreams of infinite scaling. He discovered several papers that described software-assisted hardware recovery. The basic idea was simple: if hardware suffers more transient failures as it gets smaller, why not allow software to detect erroneous computations and re-execute them? This idea seemed promising until John realized THAT IT WAS THE WORST IDEA EVER. Modern software barely works when the hardware is correct, so relying on software to correct hardware errors is like asking Godzilla to prevent Mega-Godzilla from terrorizing Japan. THIS DOES NOT LEAD TO RISING PROP- ERTY VALUES IN TOKYO. It’s better to stop scaling your transistors and avoid playing with monsters in the first place, instead of devising an elaborate series of monster checks- and-balances and then hoping that the monsters don’t do what monsters are always going to do because if they didn’t do those things, they’d be called dandelions or puppy hugs."