4 ms·
The article doesn't answer the question at the fundamental level. The closest it gets is this: "Increased frequency depends heavily on the current level of tech
by mysterypie 9y ago
The article doesn't answer the question at the fundamental level. The closest it gets is this: "Increased frequency depends heavily on the current level of technology and advances cannot move beyond these physical limitations."
Certainly, Moore's law is just an observation and cannot go on forever. Would it fair to say that we've simply reached the point where we can no longer "keep up" with Moore's observation because the technology is getting harder and not because we've actually reached any limit of physics?
- abpavel 9y agoIndeed, that's what I looked for too. The current transistor gate pitch is approaching atomic sizes, which results in electrons leaking through by quantum tunneling. I was hoping to understand more about how speed of light and quantum behavior is preventing further progress. Article only mentions transistor switching speed.
- Sammi 9y agoBecause the subject of the article is explicitly about clock speed and not about making transistors smaller.
- Sammi 9y agoYou're skipping over the main point of the article, which is that the reason it's hard to increase the clockrate is because it is dependent on the slowest instruction that can be done in one tick. And the main method of making an instruction faster is by splitting it, but all instructions have now already been split as much as is possible, while still having them operate correctly.
- hinkley 9y agoBut this shouldn’t be true for a superpipelined processor, right? Or put it another way, let’s say phase 3 contains several important instructions that cannot be reduced to a length of less than 1.7 clock ticks. If the pipeline stalls you have other pipelines that won’t. Or you get crazy and put in 2 copies of the slow paths of phase 3 and one takes the even ticks and the other the odd ones.