I never imagined there could be an essay that funny on the failure of Dennard scaling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wi

I never imagined there could be an essay that funny on the failure of Dennard scaling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling) and the period immediately preceding it when hardware designers had more transistors than they knew what to do with. Yeah, thinking about it: 386: we can put a 32 bit CPU on a die 486: we can improve that, add a serious cache, and FPU on die Pentium: more than one instruction at a time Pentium Pro: and out of order Pentium 4: No one listened to those warning that “THE MAGMA PEOPLE ARE WAITING FOR OUR MISTAKES.” (Intel high level engineering management frequently screws up big, see also the multiple memory architecture errors, two resulting in 1 million part each recalls.)