Sophie Wilson - The Future of Microprocessors
Erlang SolutionsRecommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 months, 2016–2018
talk · intermediate · 2016–2018 on HN
Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM instruction set, discusses the future of microprocessors, including the economics of scaling below 28nm and why much of a chip must stay powered off.
HN commenters cite it for the claim that process scaling beyond 28nm is uneconomic and for dark silicon.
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4 comments from Hacker News
It is hard (read expensive) to go under 14nm. Sophie Wilson talks about it much better then i could. ▶ this video
Moore's law has been dead for a while now. Most of the chip in your phone is powered off because otherwise it would burn up. Highly recommend watching this video: ▶ this video
I agree that this article hits pretty hard against a lot of assumptions about how our machines are working. I also feel like the author is trying to say something about how imperative scalar (meaning 'operates on one datum at a time') languages are causing more trouble than they're worth. Sophie Wilson said something similar in her talk about the future of microprocessors [1]. This implies that declarative and functional semantics would be more amenable to parallelization, as the author mentions in the article, as well as allowing the compiler more freedom to deduce a suitable 'reordering' of operations that would better fit the memory access heuristics the machine is using. [1] ▶ this video
> when Moore's Law hits physical limits? It already did. Sophie Wilson said [0] its 28nm for ever. Scaling further makes no economic sense (unless you really need the space, e.g. in Smartphones). [0] ▶ this video