Comment by Salgat

Comment by Salgat 6 months ago

1 reply

CPUs are trending towards heterogenous many core implementations. 16 core was considered server exclusive a few decades ago, now we're at heterogenous 24 core on an Intel 14900k cpu. The biggest limit right now is on the software side, hence my original comment. I wouldn't be surprised if someday the cpu and gpu become combined to overcome the memory wall, with many different types of specialized cores depending on the use case.

mlyle 6 months ago

The software side is limited, somewhat intrinsically (there tend to be a lot of things we want to do in order--- Amdahl's law wins).

And even when you aren't intrinsically limited by that, optimal placement doesn't reduce contention that much (assuming you're not ping-ponging a single cache line every operation or something dumb like that).

But the hardware side, too: we're not getting transistors that quickly anymore, and we don't want anything too much smaller than an Intel E-core. Even if we stack 3D, all that net wafer area is not cheap and isn't cheapening quickly.