Sophie Wilson - The Future of Microprocessors
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it for the claim that process scaling beyond 28nm is uneconomic and for dark silicon.
What it is
Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM instruction set, discusses the future of microprocessors, including the economics of scaling below 28nm and why much of a chip must stay powered off.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2016 to 2018.
What Hacker News said
Recommends dkarapetyan · 2016-12 · on “This AI Boom Will Also Bust”
Moore's law has been dead for a while now. Most of the chip in your phone is powered off because otherwise it would burn up. Highly recommend watching this video: [this video]
Recommends gens · 2017-05 · on “The Race to 10/7nm”
It is hard (read expensive) to go under 14nm. Sophie Wilson talks about it much better then i could. [this video]
Cites qznc · 2017-02 · on “What happened to clockless computer chips?”
> when Moore's Law hits physical limits? It already did. Sophie Wilson said [0] its 28nm for ever. Scaling further makes no economic sense (unless you really need the space, e.g. in Smartphones). [0] [this video]
Cites zengid · 2018-05 · on “C Is Not a Low-Level Language”
I agree that this article hits pretty hard against a lot of assumptions about how our machines are working. I also feel like the author is trying to say something about how imperative scalar (meaning 'operates on one datum at a time') languages are causing more trouble than they're worth. Sophie Wilson said something similar in her talk about the future of microprocessors [1]. This implies that declarative and functional semantics would be more amenable to parallelization, as the author mentions in the article, as well as allowing the compiler more freedom to deduce a suitable 'reordering' of operations that would better fit the memory access heuristics the machine is using. [1] [this video]