Weekly Shaarli

All links of one week in a single page.

Week 15 (April 8, 2024)

WikiChip
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The wiki for computer chips and processor architectures.

There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law?

This paper by Leiserson et. al (the L from the famous CLRS Algorithms book) explores how computer performance can continue to improve after Moore's law hits its limits. In this paper from 2020, the authors predict that there will be diminishing returns after 5 nm transistors, but there are 3 nm and 2 nm transistors being manufactured in 2024 (not available to China though they have the highest number of supercomputers/country). Clock speed had pretty much stopped increasing since 2004 due to increasing power requirements. We cannot continue to reduce voltage with increasing clock frequency (Dennard scaling).

The gains at the bottom are due to improvements in semiconductor technology - the tide that lifts all boats. The gains at the top on the other hand come from software performance optimization (while taking the target hardware into account), algorithmic efficiency and hardware streamlining.

Unlike the historical gains at the Bottom, however, the gains at the Top will be opportunistic, uneven, sporadic, and subject to diminishing returns as problems become better explored.