Intel mad for power, but stacked-up dies keep MELTING! Moore's Law is going to be good for at least another decade, according to chip-maker Intel. "There's always physical limits to everything," Steve Pawlowski, senior fellow and head honcho on exascale research, told The Register at the European Research and Innovation Conference in Ireland. "But you can always come up with …
Intel are trying to stack die-on-die, not package-on-package which has been done for yonks -- My old Atari ST 520 got a RAM upgrade that way with sixteen DIL chips stacked on the existing RAM chips and some legs-in-the-air (Oooh, Missus!) wiring to cope with the extra address line.
The RasperryPi chips are low-power and low-speed -- Intel want to stack DRAM dies with a couple of microns separation on top of a CPU putting out 40 watts of heat and more. I think they'll have to come up with some kind of nanoengineered active cooling system to get the heat away from the silicon at a great enough rate to prevent meltdowns or thermal noise problems at high data speeds.
I seem to recall that the Pentium IV was going to scale to 10GHz too.
"I’m kind of interested in it for a number of reasons, but is it going to take over everything and be the new technology that’s going to drive us to exascale? I don’t believe it,"
What I reckon he is really saying is that Intel have no solutions beyond silicon and so have been reduced to squeezing the last dregs from the current approach, hence multi-core and now stacking.
Stacked dies are hardly new, and many novel 3D schemes have been proposed in the past. Maybe the Intel wanker is a newbie (and he shouldn't waste his 15 minutes of fame demonstrating his lack of perspicacity).
OTOH, he is right that Moore's law impending death is greatly exaggerated. But that is hardly news except perhaps to the yellower segments of the mewling media.
That a senior chip engineer and one who earns considerable more that the OP's above would not have resorted to using the word 'wanker' . That smacks of illiterate trolling, not brainpower.
I could be wrong. Maybe the world of top end chip design is full of people who have to resort to bad language to make a point. I doubt it though, nobody here needs to.
Illiterate trolling and brainpower are, sadly, very much not mutually exclusive.
Furthermore, there is a difference between choosing to use "bad*" language and needing to. In my experience, experts often choose to use such language when talking about a topic that is close to their field of expertise, because like many humans, they are somewhat emotionally involved. I learned long ago that judging someone's intelligence from their outward appearance or choice of language is a sure way to alienate oneself from some very intelligent people.
My primary point was that AC2 assumed a lot of things from very little information. My secondary point was that posting AC in response to an AC in a conversation that very much hinges on identity-related information (expertise and salary) is somewhat ironic.
* and really, "wanker" is your limit? Really? You must have a hard time reading the comments here. Sure, nobody here needs to use such language, but they do -- very frequently.
It wasnt Freon, it was Fluorinert. Different Chemical, same idea though. Its use with the Cray-2 was single-stage (liquid), Though you can also use Fluorinert in a dual stage configuration where it turns gaseous and then condenses back into a liquid in an exchanger. Apparently you can drink it, but not breathe it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
