This is just me fantasizing but what if CPU's were 3-4 times bigger. Do you think that there would 15 Core 15Ghz power draining monsters by AMD and Efficient 12 Core 7Ghz by Intel. Do you think this would be cheaper to have bigger CPU's with the same specs?
I suppose with a much more massive die we would not have performance gains in term a GHz but being able to add more core would be a benefit. Unfortunately it will be a hit or miss since you can't always get the desired amount of cores you want from a sample of wafers. With more cores to make sure they are working correctly from the start leaves head room for a larger margin of error. Not only that, adding all those core would only force manufactures to develop much larger motherboards and consumers don't want to have to deal with overly massive unpractical machines.
The silicon would also require much more massive and more efficient heatsinks, which would cost a lot more money.With that many cores and that much heat it seems more like you are creating a heating element than something to compute numbers.
Silicon can only go so high in terms of GHz even with proper cooling. As it stands now silicon has it limits. Sure the 12 core Xeons are nice but also expensive. They are trying to meet a certain threshold of power usage and performance, hence why they are clocked so low.
Increasing die size has problems
- More material cost, silicon wafers are not cheap
- Proportional more heat
- The speed of light is a bottleneck- I read somewhere something about if you have a clock speed too high and too big of a die you run into an issue where the previous clock cycle hasn't completed yet on all parts of the chip.
Oh so is that why CPU's never got bigger?