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0 pointsjxcole15y ago0 comments

I believe I have read, though please correct me if I'm wrong, that there is a problem with current printing methods. The way that microchips are built is sort of like those projectors we used to have in class; you would dark out certain places and the rest of the areas light shines through. So those spots where the light shines get etched away, and you have your transistor layout.

Only now the light rays are so close together they get tangled up with quantum effects. So there is this scattering effect, and we can't make the transistors any smaller, because the light is out of focus. The blurry edges caused by quantum dynamics seems to be holding us back.

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hugh315y ago· 1 in thread

That's one of the reasons why we're having difficulty making 'em smaller (though semiconductor engineers are very clever and keep coming up with new methods on that front)), but doesn't have much to do with making 'em faster. We've been making 'em smaller and smaller all the time, but clock speed hasn't gone up since ~2004.

georgemcbay15y ago

"but clock speed hasn't gone up since ~2004."

And yet the latest i7s run circles around the CPUs of that time period, even when running code that is strictly single-threaded.

There have been tons of performance wins made over the last 10 years that aren't just from adding more cores and Intel's predictions were more or less right on the money, if you overlook the marketing mistake common at that time of using ghz as a shorthand for overall chip performance.

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