Comment on Are Future Chips Doomed to Overheat?
Buffalox@lemmy.world 3 days ago
One of the impressive things about chips ever since the 70’s, is how they’ve become ever denser and ever more powerful, so they are now more than 50 thousand times more complex, going from little more than a thousands, to 50 billion transistors as per 5 years ago! Yet modern chips remain very reliable, and the biggest vulnerability is not inherent, but from targeted hostile attacks against them.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
It’s almost as if the industry knows very well what they are doing.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 3 days ago
Yeah… chip designers have been battling heat output since silicon doping was invented. The main source of heat is transistors change state, since it doesn’t happen instantly and will disipate more heat when half-on, acting almost like a resistor.
The higher the clock speed, the more time a transistor spends half-on. This is why things like undervolting and underclocking reduce power usage.
Physically smaller transistors usually also means it takes less electrons to saturate the gate, so it allows lower voltages and currents to be used, while still toggling the state at the same speed. (Not to mention timing gets easier the closer the transistors are to each other)