this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
83 points (91.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35911 readers
1374 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Ok I think I do know the answer but I never learned it, so I want to learn it today. It's been about 1 year now we can reliably make 3nm chips, which is impressive on a scale of size. But why is is better? My theory is simply: We can make a product the same size but add more on it because it's smaller, making it stronger and faster for more complex operations. Which would mean it's not the chip that's impressive on its own, just the size of it.

Or there is something else, and I'd love to get the full explanation and understand chips better

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] jet@hackertalks.com 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The faster you want a chip to go, the less time there is between every cycle. It takes time for signals to propagate across silicon. The smaller the window, The less workable area you have. An entire CPU wants to get clocked together, meaning you want all the components more or less running at the same speed, so they can work together efficiently.

At 10ghz with speed of light delays you can only move 2cm per cycle. And the propagation rate of electrons in silicon is even lower.

This is a reason multi-core processors have become more common. They're different time domains. Each processor core is at the limit of usable area within the time constraint. So to get more computation power you add more cores instead. Sadly most programmers still write single threaded programs. Only people who absolutely need performance bother with writing real multithreaded programs. So on your 64 core machine, you're probably only using one or two cores at any time. Realistically

Other people have already talked about temperature, so I won't.

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is also why we use speculative execution and various length pipelines per core for single threaded execution

A long pipeline creates big delays when an instruction wasn’t the correct one, but on average it saves time

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pentium 4 has entered the chat...

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah 😂

I was specifically thinking about pentium 4 when I said long pipelines aren’t always better 😂

Speculative execution has wound up having security implications as well