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mtucker502yesterday at 2:54 PM6 repliesview on HN

What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?


Replies

sparkieyesterday at 5:16 PM

That's not going to happen, but there's alternative research such as [1] where we get rid of the clock and use self-timed circuits.

[1]:https://arc.cecs.pdx.edu/

vessenesyesterday at 3:25 PM

Like any doubling rule, the buck has to stop somewhere. Higher energy usage + smaller geometry means much more exotic analog physics to worry about in chips. I’m not a silicon engineer by any means but I’d expect 10Ghz cycles will be optical or very exotically cooled or not coming at us at all.

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ameliusyesterday at 6:01 PM

There have been overclockers who reached 9GHz using liquid helium.

It's simply impossible at room temperatures without extreme cooling.

Also you will run into interconnect speed issues, since 10GHz corresponds to .1 nanoseconds which corresponds to 3 centimeters (assuming lightspeed, in reality this is lower).

So sadly, we'll be stuck in this "clock-speed winter" for a little longer.

brennanpetersonyesterday at 3:31 PM

None for normal.compute, since energy density is still fundamental. But the interesting option is cryogenic computing, which can have zero switching energy, and 10s of GHz clock rates

Some neat startups to watch for in this space.

magic_manyesterday at 3:04 PM

The energy consumed is cv^2f. It makes no sense to keep increasing frequency as you make power way worse.

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HarHarVeryFunnyyesterday at 3:27 PM

What would be the benefit? You don't need a 10GHz processor to browse the web, or edit a spreadsheet, and in any case things like that are already multi-threaded.

The current direction of adding more cores makes more sense, since this is really what CPU intensive programs generally need - more parallelism.

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