Gives a good intro about AMD’s Pentium 4 moment.
That pipeline was built with the same logic that got intel the fast clocked P4 which could be beat by a much lower clocked Athlon 64.
The longer pipeline allowed the Bulldozer family of processors to achieve a much higher clock frequency compared to its K10 predecessors. While this increased frequencies and throughput, the longer pipeline also increased latencies and increased branch misprediction penalties.
Piledriver improved little of the critical performance limiters of the Bulldozer architecture, it just pushed clocks even higher to compensate, increased the TDP and added workarounds that did little to address the core problem.
If I’m correct under 7nm, with silicon only, you begin to meet quantum effects such as tunneling. And you don’t want to happen because an electron could pass even if the transistor is open. So you need to dope the silicon to change its property but even then at some point you will need to change of material like by using graphene to achieve smaller node.
so you think they are staying with 14nm silicon or actually working with those ‘others’, and produce some different kind of chips - maybe not based on silicon anymore?
I honestly don’t expect that to happen in the next decade, if ever. You can already live justwith SSDs, a 256/512GB isn’t really that expensive and should be enough for an operating system and a few applications, but if you need real storage it’s long way foward.
Price per GB is still about 6x cheaper on hard drives than solid state. If you consider that even tape is still around it’s hard to see anything displacing magnetic storage in the foreseeable future.
I’m not actively working on ditching HDDs, but several generations of flash have existed that allowed you to cram 10-20TB of flash chips into a 3.5in form factor.
And I’m guessing it’s probably easier to spool up more flash manufacturing than HDD manufacturing. Thus making it more available and cheaper.
I would assume that especially for DOD or other US Government stuff, CPU manufacturing has to take place in the US, so what happens with GlobalFoundries canceling 7nm? The other notable partner in that alliance is Samsung, but I assume all their fabs are in Korea.
Then again, the 14LPP used for Zen/AMD is different from the 14HP process used for POWER9/Z14/IBM. Is it possible this news only affects the AMD processes, and not those planned for use by IBM for (presumably) POWER10 and Z15? Or was there never going to be an LPP/HP split for 7nm?