3 ms·

A beginner question: what's the motivation behind reducing chip size? Less power consumption?

• Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Less power consumption and/or the ability to cram more transistors into the same area. Less power consumption also means less heat generated. I think heat dissipation is the main roadblock to faster CPUs (faster in terms of clock speed). IANAEE but I think the speed of light becomes a big issue at higher clock speeds. Putting transistors physically closer to each other helps reduce problems with propagation delay.
• dmos62 7y ago
  Lately, I've been asking these "simple" question more often on HN. They are consistently down-voted: I can't imagine why.
• marcosdumay 7y ago
  Smaller transistors bring everything. They have lower resistance and capacitance resisting a switch, you can build more of them at the same time (so, approximately by the same cost), a signal takes less time to pass through them (and to get from one to another), and they have a larger surface/volume ratio for cooling down. That said, transistors actually stopped shrinking a while ago. They are getting packaged nearer to each other, they have changed from horizontal to vertical, and they are changing the width/length ratio, but they are not really shrinking.