By: Pierre (Boutoukoat.delete@this.yahoo.fr), April 29, 2015 4:38 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
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> In layman's terms ... how much faster does the final device go?
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Moore's law is not about speed, it is about #transistors vs. costs. The manufacturer going from 20 to 10 nm will be able to store 4 times more processors per wafer, or 4 times more transistor per processor, at ~identical~ costs.
Dissipated power is O(frequency) and O(squared voltage). The article mention the voltage could be reduced by 200 millivolts, e.g. go from 0.9 to 0.7 volts. This mean a reduction of power of 40%, and in layman terms, 40% more battery life on a processor 4 times cheaper. Reasoning at constant power and ignoring o a lot of details, frequency could increase by 40% if voltage goes from 0.9V to 0.7V. However, most of the perceived performance out of a processor comes from memory speed (unchanged ...) , parallelism and integration of co-processors like GPU and NICs (more transistors), and software benchmarks.
For the last 10 years, frequency of desktops for gamers has not increased (peak around 4 Ghz on the most expensive Intel CPUs). It looks unlikely to change in the near future, and the trend to add more cores will continue. I hope this helps to answer your obsolete question "how faster ?" typical from the 90's. Right questions now are "how cheaper ?" , "how longer ?" ...
> In layman's terms ... how much faster does the final device go?
>
Moore's law is not about speed, it is about #transistors vs. costs. The manufacturer going from 20 to 10 nm will be able to store 4 times more processors per wafer, or 4 times more transistor per processor, at ~identical~ costs.
Dissipated power is O(frequency) and O(squared voltage). The article mention the voltage could be reduced by 200 millivolts, e.g. go from 0.9 to 0.7 volts. This mean a reduction of power of 40%, and in layman terms, 40% more battery life on a processor 4 times cheaper. Reasoning at constant power and ignoring o a lot of details, frequency could increase by 40% if voltage goes from 0.9V to 0.7V. However, most of the perceived performance out of a processor comes from memory speed (unchanged ...) , parallelism and integration of co-processors like GPU and NICs (more transistors), and software benchmarks.
For the last 10 years, frequency of desktops for gamers has not increased (peak around 4 Ghz on the most expensive Intel CPUs). It looks unlikely to change in the near future, and the trend to add more cores will continue. I hope this helps to answer your obsolete question "how faster ?" typical from the 90's. Right questions now are "how cheaper ?" , "how longer ?" ...
