Ok I think I do know the answer but I never learned it, so I want to learn it today. It’s been about 1 year now we can reliably make 3nm chips, which is impressive on a scale of size. But why is is better? My theory is simply: We can make a product the same size but add more on it because it’s smaller, making it stronger and faster for more complex operations. Which would mean it’s not the chip that’s impressive on its own, just the size of it.
Or there is something else, and I’d love to get the full explanation and understand chips better
The faster you want a chip to go, the less time there is between every cycle. It takes time for signals to propagate across silicon. The smaller the window, The less workable area you have. An entire CPU wants to get clocked together, meaning you want all the components more or less running at the same speed, so they can work together efficiently.
At 10ghz with speed of light delays you can only move 2cm per cycle. And the propagation rate of electrons in silicon is even lower.
This is a reason multi-core processors have become more common. They’re different time domains. Each processor core is at the limit of usable area within the time constraint. So to get more computation power you add more cores instead. Sadly most programmers still write single threaded programs. Only people who absolutely need performance bother with writing real multithreaded programs. So on your 64 core machine, you’re probably only using one or two cores at any time. Realistically
Other people have already talked about temperature, so I won’t.
This is also why we use speculative execution and various length pipelines per core for single threaded execution
A long pipeline creates big delays when an instruction wasn’t the correct one, but on average it saves time
Pentium 4 has entered the chat…
Yeah 😂
I was specifically thinking about pentium 4 when I said long pipelines aren’t always better 😂
Speculative execution has wound up having security implications as well