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Since you sound quite expert -- I would love to learn from you (or others), at a beginner's level: Is the design + production of a chip an exercise in optimizi

Since you sound quite expert -- I would love to learn from you (or others), at a beginner's level: Is the design + production of a chip an exercise in optimizing the combination of: -- size of die (and therefore overall cost/yield?) -- power consumption -- number / type / purpose of compute and memory subcomponents packed into the area -- speed Is that basically the envelope that you're doing an optimization within, and until a technology jump, even Intel/AMD/ARM-based are all simply choosing values between these dimensions? And each different choice of parameters within these basically goes after a certain segment of user? Thanks!

glangdale 6y ago
I am not a hardware design expert, but... yes. Everyone makes their choice between speed, power consumption and cost. I attended a event once at Intel where someone told the anecdote that, "If someone comes to me and says, gee, I'd like a chip that runs faster, consumes less power and is cheaper to make I tell them 'you are overpaid for whatever it is that you do'". The technology jump is of course the thing that allows you to "have it all" - until it doesn't. So it's clear that the optimization of Intel's 14nm++++++ is better for speed right now than anything they have at 10nm, which is better for density and power consumption. It used to be that the shrinks were unambiguously better but we've entered a strange new world. Honestly, from the design perspective, I'm a enthusiastic spectator - to the extent I have insider knowledge it's out of date, poorly understood and not shareable in any case. Microarchitecture is still very important - a better uarch and get you big effects without process changes. The last unambigiously successful one of these was Broadwell to Skylake. I think it will be fascinating to see the backport of Sunny Cove to 14nm ("Rocket Lake") as the difference between Rocket and Comet Lakes will give us a great natural experiment in how much microarchitecture changes matter without the usual distractions of process changes. That used to be the "tick" in "tick/tock" but the uarch change is much bigger than usual and the process changes from Comet to Rocket will (I think) be quite small.

glangdale 6y ago

I am not a hardware design expert, but... yes. Everyone makes their choice between speed, power consumption and cost. I attended a event once at Intel where someone told the anecdote that, "If someone comes to me and says, gee, I'd like a chip that runs faster, consumes less power and is cheaper to make I tell them 'you are overpaid for whatever it is that you do'". The technology jump is of course the thing that allows you to "have it all" - until it doesn't. So it's clear that the optimization of Intel's 14nm++++++ is better for speed right now than anything they have at 10nm, which is better for density and power consumption. It used to be that the shrinks were unambiguously better but we've entered a strange new world. Honestly, from the design perspective, I'm a enthusiastic spectator - to the extent I have insider knowledge it's out of date, poorly understood and not shareable in any case. Microarchitecture is still very important - a better uarch and get you big effects without process changes. The last unambigiously successful one of these was Broadwell to Skylake. I think it will be fascinating to see the backport of Sunny Cove to 14nm ("Rocket Lake") as the difference between Rocket and Comet Lakes will give us a great natural experiment in how much microarchitecture changes matter without the usual distractions of process changes. That used to be the "tick" in "tick/tock" but the uarch change is much bigger than usual and the process changes from Comet to Rocket will (I think) be quite small.