3 ms·

I'd be interested to hear some informed opinions on this tech... Doesn't this add a ton of heat, and therefore a loss in clock speed? Do the benefits of impro

• Kirby64 6y ago
  Silicon in general is a pretty good heat conductor, so that's not a huge issue. Jacking up density does mean you get more heat in the same area, so you do run into issues with that. That said, having dies close to each other dimensionally is good, since you run into issues with latency if stuff is too far apart. Speed of light is actually a limiting factor. So, although you can't have all of the silicon 'hot', you can increase the amount of silicon you have as long as more of it is 'dark' (i.e. not active). Seems like this is a benefit overall, although I wonder if the cost is actually effective. Even processors today do this - if they're computing complex instructions (e.g., AVX512), they actually downclock because too much silicon is used and they would heat up too much otherwise.
• kgc 6y ago
  Increasing degrees of freedom always allows for better solutions.
• chongli 6y ago
  The advantage of this is to move things closer together and lower latency. If that means running at a lower clock rate in order to keep heat under control, that may be an acceptable tradeoff. Different problems benefit differently from low latency vs high throughput. A high throughput machine like a GPU is fantastic for crushing giant matrices due to massive parallelism. On the other hand, an extremely low latency machine is what you want for traditional programs that are full of nondeterminism. There you want as much fast memory to be as close to the CPU as possible so that you’re not waiting as long every time you get a cache miss.