3 ms·
Instantaneous power draw can be quite considerable too, when you have millions of transistors switching in a short lapse of time. Typically you cannot really in
by MayeulC 5y ago
Instantaneous power draw can be quite considerable too, when you have millions of transistors switching in a short lapse of time. Typically you cannot really include capacitors on the die, so those are close to it. It might have to do with it, but I haven't read TFA yet.
- bsder 5y agoActually, inductive ringing on the power grid is generally a bigger problem than lack of capacitance. Generally, not all the transistors in your chip switch. The transistors that don't switch provide a charge reservoir to draw from for the transistors that do. The problem is then backfilling all that current that got lost and you have to do that within one clock cycle--which is the "lots of current" that this article is talking about. Because you have these pulses of current snapping from on to off at fairly high frequencies being fed over long distances with very little resistance to damp them, inductance kicks in and starts causing oscillations (LC tank). However, at this point Moore's Law about performance is dead (2x every 18 months), so this is not a very big deal. Moore's Law about cost is still alive (double the number of transistors/halve the cost every 18 months). So, the big deal currently is in the embedded space where leakage is more problematic because the die is mostly determined by RAM and flash sizes which goes directly to current leakage and die size.
- MayeulC 5y agoThank you for the insightful comment!