On Wed, 17 Feb 2016 18:06:00 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

> And well, with new materials, the potential for higher speeds.
> These researchers managed to get a silicon-germanium transistor up to
> 800Ghz (cryonic) and the article speaks of the possibility of running at
> Thz.
> 
> http://www.news.gatech.edu/2014/02/17/silicon-germanium-chip-sets-new-
speed-record
> 
> Moore's law deals with the number of transistors on the same chip. But who cares if you can have faster and more?

Distance penalties.

First there's the design issue of routing electrical impulses to different parts of the chip without interfering with other paths. You can solve that by making the chip even bigger, and you can partially address it with heavy duty constraint solvers.

Then there's that pesky speed of electrical signal transmission. A bigger chip incurs that penalty more often.

One thing you can do is simply replicate your CPU multiple times. We currently have multicore CPUs to do this in a convenient way, but this involves some caution with cache invalidation and shared memory. Muck about with scheduling and shared memory stuff and you could get more isolated parallelism, allowing cheaper manycore CPUs. Not sure if that would be much of a benefit.

On Wednesday, 17 February 2016 at 18:24:36 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> I'm thinking more about distributed platforms. We made our server support farm configuration, and the customer was happy to buy 6 farm nodes and plans to add 3 more. For some reason a farm is cheaper than one big iron server?

It probably has to do with yield (number of faulty chips), market size and competition. The volume was too low for IBM, so IBM recently "sold" their chip manufacturing plant to Global Foundaries by paying them $1billion to take it. (a negative price of $1billion)

High end Xeon CPU (22nm):
E7-8893 v3 (45M Cache, 3.20 GHz), 4 cores
tray price: $6841
price in Norway: $11000

Desktop (14nm):
i7-6700K Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.20 GHz), 4 cores
street price in Norway: $344

The beefy Xeon has a very big cache and is more reliable, but slower and eeeexpensive...