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Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died
- danso 2y agoApparently he died 5 months ago, but seems to not have gotten a lot of notice on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40276464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40276464 Mainstream outlets did write obits at the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/technology/robert-dennard-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/technology/robert-dennard...
- ayaen 2y agoMaybe its just me but here are people who made the world around us possible, and yet theu go unnoticed, in shadows, we seriously should celebrate and discuss scientists and technologists more, there are so many out there as important as Einstein, Lorenz Feynman and yet no where to be found in todays culture...
- vinaypai 2y agoDRAM pioneers don't die, they just stop their refresh cycle.
- littlestymaar 2y agoNot to be confused with Bob Denard[1] with 1 “n”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Denard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Denard
- petesoper 2y ago"By the early 1970s, DRAM was standard in virtually all computers." Perfect bullshit.
- osnium123 2y agoHe passed away months ago. RIP. He seems like a class act from what I’ve heard.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- declan_roberts 2y ago> 91 I really hope I live as long as these guys. It's one thing to invent something useful, it's another to spend your life watching it grow.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agowasnt there a 98 year old who got their second nobel?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- adharmad 2y agoRoger Penrose is 93 and as sharp as a tack!
- mhh__ 2y agoAnother: Ed Thorpe is similarly old and still going strong, last time I saw.
- declan_roberts 2y agoBuilt different.
- monocasa 2y agoThis is the Dennard of Dennard Scaling, a chip scaling law that is arguably as important as Moore's Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture was a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to, why the Cell processor never hit the 5Ghz it was supposed to, why we've been spending quite a bit of the transistor budget on more cores rather than a very fancy single CPU core of 10Bs of transistors, and why chips with lower thermal limits will see a lot of "dead silicon" where you can't actually light up the whole chip at once without melting it.
- chx 2y agoBut when Dennard Scaling was in full swing, it was glorious. It only took six years to go from the original Pentium 60Hz on March 22, 1993 to Pentium III 600 MHz on August 2, 1999 and just a year later you could buy a 1GHz one.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoDennard scaling, for people in the industry, was far more important than Moore's law when it was available. Moore made a high-level observation, but Dennard told you how to do it.
- cpldcpu 2y agoWell, it's basically the technical implementation of Moore's law, since Moore's law is just an empirical observation. (And maybe also a self-fulfilling prophecy)
- mepian 2y ago>The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture was a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to, why the Cell processor never hit the 5Ghz it was supposed to Around that time the PowerPC 970 aka G5 also failed to achieve 3 GHz, breaking the promise Steve Jobs publicly made at one of his keynotes for Apple.
- senkora 2y agoNow there will be a twinge of sadness whenever I read a paper beginning with “Since the end of Dennard scaling…”.
- scrlk 2y agoRIP. I was surprised that it didn't get much attention on HN when the news broke back in April, considering Dennard's large contributions to technology.
- gjvc 2y ago(April)
- blisterpeanuts 2y agoBob Dennard enjoyed Scottish country dancing, which is how I knew him. He was a kind and humble man. R.I.P.
- drzzhan 2y agoRIP.
- snvzz 2y agoWonder if he had some choice words about ECC.
- petabyt 2y agoPrevious discussion from 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40276464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40276464
- pkphilip 2y agoMay his memory live on