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For anyone wondering why this is done like so instead of literally counting transistors: Transistors with 2,3,.. gates are functionally identical to 2,3,.. tra
by nousermane 5y ago
For anyone wondering why this is done like so instead of literally counting transistors:
Transistors with 2,3,.. gates are functionally identical to 2,3,.. transistors connected in series, but take chip area that is only a small fraction larger than 1 "normal" transistor. Counting those as either 1, or as multiple (by number of gates) would skew stats in a less-then-useful way.
That is - among other quirks. Ken Shirriff [1] has some excellent articles that touch the topic of what exactly counts as a "transistor".
[1] http://www.righto.com/ http://www.righto.com/
- MrBuddyCasino 5y agoWould achievable SRAM cache size per mm2 work?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Tuna-Fish 5y agoThat is an important metric, but SRAM scales differently to logic density, and there can be processes where SRAM is proportionally much more or less expensive than some logic. Properly representing transistor density is a very hard problem, to which many different solutions have been proposed. It's just that the solution typically shows the processes of those who proposed it in the best possible light, so there is no industry consensus.
- keanebean86 5y agoHow about making an open source benchmark chip. It could have sram, logic, io, etc. As part of releasing a node, manufacturers would port the benchmark chip.
- tromp 5y agoThey could make it a chip to efficiently solve Cuckatoo32 [1], using 1GB of SRAM (or 0.5GB SRAM and 0.5GB off-chip DRAM) to find cycles in bipartite random graphs with 2^32 edges. [1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
- tomcam 5y agoThat seems kind of brilliant to me.
- syockit 5y agoThat might prove to be a difficult endeavour for foundries that do not design their own chips.