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Comment by PaulHoule

Moore’s law is alive but the benefits are diminishing.

Until 2005 or so, shrinking transistors automatically increased speed and reduced power consumption. When that ran out of steam, the industry went to multi core and massive parallelism with GPUs.

Until recently each shrink also lowered the cost per transistor, but that seems to have run out also and has something to do with why Intel was stuck at 14nm for so long and why new GPU prices are so insane despite a collapse in demand and resolution of the supply chain crisis for high end chips.

Chiplets at best are neutral with regard to cost. If manufacturing overhead is low, two chiplets give you twice the transistors at twice the cost. The industry did not pursue chiplets with a lot of vigor until now because it was a less competitive approach to scaling than shrinking transistors until now.

parent PaulHoule 4 years ago

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