Jon, I have to say thanks for your in-depth coverage and even more so for keeping your graphs onscreen to give me enough time to smash the pause button. Too many creators flash a graph up for 3 seconds and assume the viewer is completely au fait with the narrative.
Agreed. However, I would appreciate it if Jon would add more padding after the “Alright everyone…” wrap up. The videos end so abruptly, and throw up the next one, that there’s almost not enough time to hit Pause so one can begin reading the comments. I know, First World problems. 🤷🏻♂️
Intel Tejas and Jayhawk were canceled successors to Prescott. They were supposed to be 40-50 stages and 7+GHz. Intel always takes a long time to learn their lessons.
There was also a version of Nehalem that was netburst based, aiming for 10 GHz. The name was re used later for the 45nm processor that actually launched.
@@jrherita The codename for a dual-core Tejas, Cedar Mill, was also reused for the final 65nm revision of the Pentium 4, which also happened to be used for the dual core P4s.
9:10 - “AMD’s dual core… in 2004”… “Intel’s Pentium D in 2005” Sun Microsystems dual core UltraSPARC IV was released in 2004… a massive jump was made by Sun Microsystems octal core UltraSPARC T1 in 2005 16 & 32 core processors were later used by Sun Microsystems & then by Oracle Corporation… while handling 4 instructions per cycle & speeding to 5 GHz on the SPARC T8. SPARC by TSMC pushed the market to incredible places, by leading often years ahead of their time.
Prescott, also known as Preshot, was AMD's big opening. They'd realized that pushing for ever higher clockspeeds was a fool errands, and designed a much smarter pipeline that could execute many more instructions per clock cycle. It was the Athlon XP and it should have dominated the world. Why it didn't is a story best told by Jim from Adored TV.
The first Pentium Ds (Smithfield, also 90 nm like Prescott) were an enormous gimmick (two separate dies) and would heat an auditorium. The AMD64 stuff of the era was just so clearly blowing it out of the water. I sometimes wonder what would have become of Intel if they hadn’t managed to get the Core architecture out the door in time and Apple had selected AMD for their x86 refresh.
@@andersjjensenUnfortunately, Bulldozer was never meant to be cheap. Sandy bridge cost less to make and the intention of BD was never to clock high, they just didn't have a choice and found out they could clock it high since the end result IPC is well, poor
@@JohnVance Intel was also very, very lucky that their mobile team in Israel kept iterating on the Pentium 3 design to produce the lineage that eventually became the Core processors. Without that alternative approach to fall back on once they finally realized the deep pipeline Pentium 4 approach was a dead end, they would have taken years longer to catch back up. I sometimes wonder if the team that persevered with that design got the recognition they deserved for effectively saving the company from itself.
The Pentium4 was also an opening for Transmeta to show a different way. We were focused on lower power while still keeping up the IPC. We had developed a really clever clock tree architecture that allowed us to only clock parts of the chip that needed to be updated that cycle (clock enables as far as the eye could see). This meant our active power was really, really low. We also did frequency/voltage scaling before anyone else as far as I am aware. This got our active power even lower. Playing with the substrate voltage was another hack we had to lower our leakage current. You should do an episode on Transmeta.
The "code morphing" always fascinated me, and I'm curious how it compares to modern CPU micro-code. Having more of the instructions be "software defined" sounds like it came with a cost, but offered a lot of options.
One of the intriguing things about Transmeta was that theoretically you could emulate any architecture; you just had to make a version of CMS that supports it. However, as has been learned time and again over the years (see especially Intel's Itanium), sometimes the magical software doesn't work as well as you'd hope, if it even appears at all, and so you're stuck with clever hardware that doesn't really do much outside of a carefully tuned environment. Also, Transmeta chips really would've needed huge high-speed caches (32MB or greater) for the CMS if they were truly going to supplant any of the big players in markets outside of netbooks and web appliances; using main RAM for it wasn't going to cut it in the high-performance sector. And nowadays most CPUs have several sub-architectures (SSE, AVX, MMX, AES generators, etc.) that are hardware-optimized, something the Transmeta chips wouldn't have been able to efficiently emulate without a unique set of SIMD engines of their own.
micro meter, kilobyte... terms that used to be so familiar now sound downright quaint. Back in the 70s, likely no one was thinking nanometer or gigabyte - now just mere baselines. Progress.
idk. Also in the 70s, schematics were included with many sophisticated electronics, and you go to a store with spare parts, maybe get a new vacuum tube, or you might hire someone to come to your house to fix it. "Right to repair" was naturally assumed. Also assumed, at least for the future of computers, using one would mean coding in a programming language, like Basic. "Home computers" hardly did anything else. I'm ranting at this point, but for every tech improvement, has come a disempowerment of people. I used to laugh at people who refused to work with a PC in the 80s, but I'm appreciating their sentiment more and more. Progress?
Nearly everything I both marveled and shook my head at from the sidelines of the semi, computer, and IT industry for the last 20 years (and all that time buried in those HW and chip articles), you pretty much condensed in 15 mins. Brings words to thought. Still excited and blind about what's around the corner, what's coming, and which player is going to turn over next...
It's pretty crazy how little the average developer knows about concurrency/threading. 15 years ago it kinda made sense, but it's still mostly the same niche of C++/Rust nerds who get it. It's a big problem in things that DON'T need a ton of CPU. A lot of apps suck because people don't know how to work with a single UI thread so they're constantly blocking the UI with non-UI stuff.
Threading is used extensively in backend and gamedev, which is much more than just C++/Rust. I guess your statement makes sense if you only count frontend/web development
First rule of mobile development (so Obj-C, Swift, Java, Kotlin) is never to block the main thread. iOS and Android have had concurrency/threading systems as core parts of their SDKs basically forever (GCD and now Swift Concurrency on iOS and Handlers and now Kotlin Coroutines) and are a core part of mobile development for basically every engineer working on these apps. The idea that only a few Rust and C++ devs understand concurrency and that everyone else is constantly blocking the main/UI thread is absurd.
The idea of dark silicon was prevalent in the spacecraft electronics industry in the early ‘80s when I used it. Much cruder though. Here the issue was using TTL logic (all that was available for radiation hardened work) for complex functions. We would cycle power to individual chips to reduce the power demands on a very limited supply.
Love your videos! I'm a PhD student currently working on the RF test and measurement side of semiconductors at the on wafer level (e.g. S parameters, load pull, NVNA etc) - would be great to see a video on that at some point if possible!
Great, and it's good that Dennard receives the credit that he deserves as he never mentioned in the press due to his obsession with "Moore's law" due to Intel's marketing machine.
These kind of difficulties always stimulate new inventions. I'm pretty sure if we had these 50GHz chips the systems wouldn't perform 10x faster, also because much less effort put in software optimization, and less hardware acceleration that CPUs / GPUs are stuffed with today. Parallel computing development was an obvious thing anyway, as it reflects the way heavy multi-tasking systems work.
Evolution in nature also followed this curve. Nerves started slow, but sped up using electrochemical reactions. It was a dead end. Nature didn't give up on speeding up neurons as much as discovered the advantages of parallelism. Your brain is a relatively slow communicating, but massively parallel machine.
@@brodriguez11000computers aren't necessarily digital. Early computers, and some today, are analog too. Our brains are indeed analog computers, just with a structure we don't understand
I think this is my favorite video so far! You condensed so much about why it’s hard to design semiconductors into a short and interesting presentation. Well done! 👏👏👏
You don't have to guess that Intel chased clock speed above all else. This was stated at the time. To crank up the clock they had to introduce long pipelines. Most code could not keep those pipelines filled. So a few pieces of code that fit the pipeline architecture well ran blazingly fast, but most code spent much its time stalled. They started losing to AMD on real world performance, and were saved by the guys from Isreal, who had been working on a different approach. Semiconductor companies being saved by the guys from Isreal could be the basis for an interesting video. It has happened multiple times. Its unclear if the guys from Isreal are smarter, or if far from headquarters they are not pressured to pursue dumb goals.
Intel's Isreal-based researchers were charged with designing smaller, more efficient cores for laptops, so they didn't have the area, gate or cooling budgets for deep pipelining. This gave them the latitude to explore alternative approaches. However, most everyone really paying attention could see Intel's P4 designs were chasing pure "bigger number = better" Ghz which sound impressive to the clueless but are, in reality, pretty terrible across broad workloads. Those deep pipeline cache stalls, prediction and speculative execution misses just crushed performance. All that deep pipelining infrastructure also consumed a lot of gates on its own. Not doing most of it freed up a gates which could be applied toward doing real work.
@@MarkishMr They were chasing, as well as Intel fans were chasing. All anyone could talk about at the time were faster single core. Understandable because single thread was easy to understand and do. Concurrency took a skilled programmer a lot more work to pull off effectively.
I still think there's algorithmic and OS/language optimizations that are yet to be realized... As an old school embedded programmer I'm convinced that at least half of the clock cycles of a modern PC are wasted with bloat... but I'm probably oversimplifying the problem...
Depends what you mean by bloat, lots of spent cycles on non critical things but that's a tradeoff with simpler programming, more io, more OS features etc If you consider that anything more advanced than windows XP is bloat then you can indeed run a whole PC in the single watts range
You are most likely correct. The problem that has crept into all software is that we have the memory to add an extra layer of configuration to everything, so software never resolves to a "finalized automation" of the kind that you get in the embedded world, where every byte and clock cycle can be properly accounted for. Instead we have a vast infrastructure of dynamically adjusting budgets for computing resources, just-in-time recompilation, abstracted programming interfaces, fallbacks, etc. That spills over into even more incidental complexity. It's known that as software gets bigger, more of the code "goes dark" - it either executes once or never, while the "hot spots" become much tighter in nature - tiny sections of assembly code that are hammered. But when there's an excess of configuration, there's no easy way to get at the hot spots. It's related to Conway's Law effects - it's not that we need all that configuration for an application, it's that having it is a way of designing for an adverse environment where you don't know who or what your program talks to, so everyone assumes the worst.
“Nature hates a void”. As the architecture (hardware) makes improvements and optimizations software is there to eventually occupy the newly discovered space - also an oversimplification. 😄
If you weren't around in the 90's you won't understand just how crazy it was. On average CPUs got 10% better IPC/year 50% higher clocks per year. Power went from about 3 watts to about 60 watts. CPUs went went from being bare ceramic packages without a heat sink to having a tiny 8000 RPM earbleedingly awful fan to having larger sinks with low speed fans. Graphics cards went from being a pure 2D affair without any acceleration, to including more and more GUI acceleration features, to rasterizing and texturing triangles to per pixel lighting and hardware T&L to having per pixel programmable shaders in the early 00's. Games had not settle on what they could be and settled into making basically a reskin of the same AAA action-adventure type game with different art assets and settings and the same basic gameplay. Developers were trying to one up each other with all kinds of crazy new ideas throghout the 90's. A lot of it was predictably awful; some of it was pure magic (like ultima underworld; that games is like finding rabbit fossils in precambrian rock; it just shouldn't exist and shouldn't be possible on a 386). Without a technology to replace silicon CMOS and being a new exponential leg of a technological S-curve there will never be anything like it again. To underpin just how crazy the 90's was. If Dennard scaling had magically continued, somehow, we'd have 1.6 THz single core CPUs with 80 kW TDP. That's the exponential we were on for over a decade and 2002-2005 felt like crashing into a brick wall. In the 90's most people defined their hardware by the clock speed; it was nearly synonymous with performance. Before "netburst" only really cyrix was an outlier with terrible IPC. For marketing reasons it was obvious why intel did what they did. They had pulled that same rabbit out of the hat a dozen times before; if they could do it again and AMD did not they'd be years ahead. If they tried it and failed, at least they'd still have higher clocks and manage to sell some CPUs on outdated metrics.
I cannot agree more, the 90s was the time of my late teens/early adulthood and it was just crazy and the time I made software development my professional career. It was a wild-west feeling, always something exciting new thing comeing and going. And extra credit for mentioning Ultima Underworld, I was speechless when I started it the first time on my 386DX-40... magic did not do it justice for its time.
I worked in a computer shop at the time. Processors were hot potatoes, every week unsold lost tangible value. Dissipators went from tack-on gimmicks to frame-mounted behemoths. Software spell checking went from luxury to mainstream.
My favourite expression of this is that singlecore performance of my home computer rose about a million times (counting IPC) in the first half of my computing life, and ten in the last. (ZX81 flops -> 2GHz P4 ->12600)
At the time multi core processors came out, multi processor computing, hence multi core but each processor in a separate housing unit, had been around for quite a few years for not only simulation but real life applications such as Photoshop, Maya, 3D rendering including visualisation of MRIs in the medical industry. On Intel, MIPS, Sparc, Power PC and Alpha platforms. On workstations and servers.
Dear sir, I love you videos. The information is presented so clearly and thoroughly that I feel I learn and retain something new after every one I watch! But, please, I have one request I feel should be very easy for you to implement. Could you PLEASE increase the volume of your voiceovers? In order for me to comfortably hear you I need to raise the volume of my TV to a level that makes the ads obscenely loud. On my TV any volume level over 10 and the ads are ear splittingly loud. I need the volume at 13 to 15 on your videos to hear you clearly. I have to watch with the TV remote in my hand, finger on the mute button, ready to press it the instant an ad starts to play. If I'm off by just a few seconds the effect is so jarring my wife will hear it 3 rooms over through 2 closed doors. And if it wakes the baby, well, my day/night is just ruined, lol! Thank you for all the amazing information you've provided me on so many topics that I find interesting! I truly do appreciate the effort you put in to these videos. If you could fix this one issue you would make me a VERY happy man! Thank you for your time and keep up the great work.
11:45 is there really no updated version of this graph? It ends in 2015, which is now ten years ago. Would be very interesting to see how things developed since then.
Would we have GPUs today if our CPUs were able to keep scaling in Ghz? Yes, because we started getting GPUs when CPUs were still very slow, around 100mhz if I remember back to when I bought the first voodoo card. So GPUs then just started speeding up as the CPUs sped up as well. By the time we had 4ghz CPUs, we had already had 5 or 6 generations of GPU. If CPUs just kept getting faster, the GPUs would have gotten faster alongside them, and developers would have included bigger and bigger polygon counts.
The first PCs had to have adapter cards to have video output. Those cards had chips on them that could be considered GPUs although display adapters could only produce text. So GPUs were a thing at the very beginning. It took almost 10 years from introduction for CPUs to reach 100 MHz. The first PC was only 4.77 MHz.
Saymour Cray had a solution for the frequency bareer for CPUs back in early 90's however he was ignored. I guess that all that investment in silicon chip manufacturing must be milked to the maximum and this is still present to this day. I am talking about moving away from silicon and using galium, germanium, carbon etc etc.
13:50 This sounds very familiar. After the P4 (and some minor iterations) came the Pentium D. All the magazines and reviewers complained of it getting very warm. The Core 2Duo which followed getting a better response from the pundits.
1996 to 2001 was really an incredible era in computing. I remember 50 or 100mhz computers being norm then doubling frequency every year then on. There were even tv commercials around that time of a guy driving home, from the electronics store, with a new latest model PC and seeing a billboard announcing the next generation. It did seem like that at the time. Then, around that time, accelerated graphics were also created and advancing. DirectX versions advanced at around the same rate as CPUs. You had to buy a new videocard every year or so because the next generation supported new compute features supported in the latest DirectX version.
Dr. Colwell gave a talk at my university a few weeks ago. He mentioned talking seeing the CEO of INTEL in the airport sometime ago and how the CEO was bragging about how their new chip that was supposed to be so great because of all the cores. He just told the CEO that the product wasn’t good because it was built off a bunch of bad early parts and was too complex and inefficient to actually be viable. He mentioned how he was correct in the end. It was an incredible talk about many things and this was just a very brief story he told. As a sophomore EE student it was so amazing to hear from him though.
I'd like to comment regarding the Pentium 4. It was a poor performer. I had several systems using these processors back then and they were noticeably sluggish. I am told that this sluggishness was a result of the deep pipelines in the processor. For example, I remember a Microsoft engineer at the time stating that a thread switch consumed roughly 7500 cycles because the pipelines and instruction caches got dumped and had to be refilled. My understanding that the follow-on after the Pentium 4 used older Pentium 3 technology. Anyway, I was not impressed that Colwell was a champion of the Pentium 4. To me, it was a failed processor.
What are we going to see ten years from now? How many cores/threads are in a mid-range PC? Is the increase in cores/threads - how long does that increase in parallelism increase?
Utilizing parallelism is very very hard. But currently the bottleneck is the memory. It's possible to design a faster processor but feeding them with data could not keep up. So ten years from now most likely memory will be integrated in the CPU package. There are already CPU and GPU architectures that do this. It will become a lot more common in the future.
Cache sizes are going to get much, much larger to reduce latency, because system memory is simply too slow and modern processors waste a ton of cycles waiting for it. Adding more cores isn't really going to help much- the tasks that can be near-infinitely parallelized are already better shipped off to a device with a GPU-like architecture. We may start seeing consumer chips with a gigabyte of L3 cache or more.
So to summarize (and compare), Moore's law is about the evolution of transistor numbers in a chip over time, while Dennard's law is about how transistor size is related to speed and voltage?
I really appreciate your videos! Could you please do a video on the IBM Power series of processors following the dissolution of the AIM alliance to present?
Phase-change cooling isn't really practical for daily use, and without it the absolute best you can do is the temperature transfer rate compared to ambient temperature. Air cooling and water cooling both run into this roadblock
Better cooling can help, but we are hitting physical limits. I do expect liquid in direct chip contact to generalize. Thermal conductance alone just doesn't cut it any more. (Passive) phase-change is powerful, and especially keeps T° range small, helping local expansion strain. Active, below-ambient seems just forever too expensive & unreliable.
And you know what is still shitty? Having to listen to people that insist on having the latest multi-core machine while they're still using single-core software. Memory management isn't the best of that piece of software either. Take a 100 MB drawing (it's all vectors, so this should be a lot smaller anyway, their drawing format must suck), you need at least 24 GB of memory, otherwise it starts swapping to disk, and then it's plainly unusable. autocad is in an incredible load of toss.
I was building desktops back then for friends and they always wanted a $300 graphics card with a nVidia chip on it. I said shit I should buy $1000 of that stock! I did, that was 2001 :). I bought Intel and AMD too. I wish I would have put all $3000 on nvda
Your oversimplified the length speed relation because all electric field moves at c but the change in electric field induces a voltage the other way it is called self inductances in L (Henry) and that should also decrease when the gate gets smaller.
Boomers developed business methodology that has put all of humanity on its end path. All your videos demonstrate this glaring reality. Thank you, boomers.
Kind of a silly thing to name after someone. Like: if you shrink everything proportionally, it will work the same! That seems like the first thing anyone would try . . .
It's not necessarily true. In fluid dynamics if you scale everything down the Reynolds number changes. So it needs to be proven that there is no similar factor happening in microelectronics.
Isn't the switching speed due to lower input capacitance (gate to source and gate to drain) due to reduced area. I dont think the few micrometer distance reduction makes much difference as the field will b propagate near the speed of light
Your videos fall into 2 categories for me - interesting as historical/engineering matter, and totally incomprehensible electronics things. So, apologies for unsubbing and resubbing so many times.
Jon, I have to say thanks for your in-depth coverage and even more so for keeping your graphs onscreen to give me enough time to smash the pause button. Too many creators flash a graph up for 3 seconds and assume the viewer is completely au fait with the narrative.
Agreed. However, I would appreciate it if Jon would add more padding after the “Alright everyone…” wrap up. The videos end so abruptly, and throw up the next one, that there’s almost not enough time to hit Pause so one can begin reading the comments. I know, First World problems. 🤷🏻♂️
My man loves brevity. Thanks to that, he's brought us the the quickest patreon shill on all of TH-cam. 😂
Intel Tejas and Jayhawk were canceled successors to Prescott. They were supposed to be 40-50 stages and 7+GHz. Intel always takes a long time to learn their lessons.
There was also a version of Nehalem that was netburst based, aiming for 10 GHz. The name was re used later for the 45nm processor that actually launched.
@@mrbigberd Probably happened on the same cursed timeline as the G5 laptop
These work in the soothing cooling liquid atmospheres of Uranus
Interesting 😮
@@jrherita The codename for a dual-core Tejas, Cedar Mill, was also reused for the final 65nm revision of the Pentium 4, which also happened to be used for the dual core P4s.
9:10 - “AMD’s dual core… in 2004”… “Intel’s Pentium D in 2005”
Sun Microsystems dual core UltraSPARC IV was released in 2004… a massive jump was made by Sun Microsystems octal core UltraSPARC T1 in 2005
16 & 32 core processors were later used by Sun Microsystems & then by Oracle Corporation… while handling 4 instructions per cycle & speeding to 5 GHz on the SPARC T8.
SPARC by TSMC pushed the market to incredible places, by leading often years ahead of their time.
Prescott, also known as Preshot, was AMD's big opening. They'd realized that pushing for ever higher clockspeeds was a fool errands, and designed a much smarter pipeline that could execute many more instructions per clock cycle. It was the Athlon XP and it should have dominated the world. Why it didn't is a story best told by Jim from Adored TV.
Ironically this is also when they started hashing initial plans for Bulldozer.
The first Pentium Ds (Smithfield, also 90 nm like Prescott) were an enormous gimmick (two separate dies) and would heat an auditorium. The AMD64 stuff of the era was just so clearly blowing it out of the water. I sometimes wonder what would have become of Intel if they hadn’t managed to get the Core architecture out the door in time and Apple had selected AMD for their x86 refresh.
@@jrherita No, that was several generations later. Bulldozer/Piledriver was a desperate attempt at selling cheaply but still making livable margins.
@@andersjjensenUnfortunately, Bulldozer was never meant to be cheap. Sandy bridge cost less to make and the intention of BD was never to clock high, they just didn't have a choice and found out they could clock it high since the end result IPC is well, poor
@@JohnVance Intel was also very, very lucky that their mobile team in Israel kept iterating on the Pentium 3 design to produce the lineage that eventually became the Core processors. Without that alternative approach to fall back on once they finally realized the deep pipeline Pentium 4 approach was a dead end, they would have taken years longer to catch back up.
I sometimes wonder if the team that persevered with that design got the recognition they deserved for effectively saving the company from itself.
Damn not listening to the engineers that work with the technology day in day out, caused them to miss an obvious pitfall?
Crazy
It's unfortunately a very popular management strategy in many companies.
Now you know why P4 was a failed arch
hey, sometimes you gotta put those engineers in their place
Like decarbonising the grid here in the UK.
@@defeatSpace this is usually the first step towards bankruptcy.
The Pentium4 was also an opening for Transmeta to show a different way. We were focused on lower power while still keeping up the IPC. We had developed a really clever clock tree architecture that allowed us to only clock parts of the chip that needed to be updated that cycle (clock enables as far as the eye could see). This meant our active power was really, really low.
We also did frequency/voltage scaling before anyone else as far as I am aware. This got our active power even lower. Playing with the substrate voltage was another hack we had to lower our leakage current.
You should do an episode on Transmeta.
The "code morphing" always fascinated me, and I'm curious how it compares to modern CPU micro-code.
Having more of the instructions be "software defined" sounds like it came with a cost, but offered a lot of options.
One of the intriguing things about Transmeta was that theoretically you could emulate any architecture; you just had to make a version of CMS that supports it. However, as has been learned time and again over the years (see especially Intel's Itanium), sometimes the magical software doesn't work as well as you'd hope, if it even appears at all, and so you're stuck with clever hardware that doesn't really do much outside of a carefully tuned environment. Also, Transmeta chips really would've needed huge high-speed caches (32MB or greater) for the CMS if they were truly going to supplant any of the big players in markets outside of netbooks and web appliances; using main RAM for it wasn't going to cut it in the high-performance sector. And nowadays most CPUs have several sub-architectures (SSE, AVX, MMX, AES generators, etc.) that are hardware-optimized, something the Transmeta chips wouldn't have been able to efficiently emulate without a unique set of SIMD engines of their own.
micro meter, kilobyte... terms that used to be so familiar now sound downright quaint. Back in the 70s, likely no one was thinking nanometer or gigabyte - now just mere baselines. Progress.
idk. Also in the 70s, schematics were included with many sophisticated electronics, and you go to a store with spare parts, maybe get a new vacuum tube, or you might hire someone to come to your house to fix it. "Right to repair" was naturally assumed. Also assumed, at least for the future of computers, using one would mean coding in a programming language, like Basic. "Home computers" hardly did anything else. I'm ranting at this point, but for every tech improvement, has come a disempowerment of people. I used to laugh at people who refused to work with a PC in the 80s, but I'm appreciating their sentiment more and more. Progress?
Nearly everything I both marveled and shook my head at from the sidelines of the semi, computer, and IT industry for the last 20 years (and all that time buried in those HW and chip articles), you pretty much condensed in 15 mins. Brings words to thought. Still excited and blind about what's around the corner, what's coming, and which player is going to turn over next...
Integrated vacuum tube transistors might have been able to make the single core multi-Gigahertz path more viable.
It's pretty crazy how little the average developer knows about concurrency/threading. 15 years ago it kinda made sense, but it's still mostly the same niche of C++/Rust nerds who get it. It's a big problem in things that DON'T need a ton of CPU. A lot of apps suck because people don't know how to work with a single UI thread so they're constantly blocking the UI with non-UI stuff.
Erlang would have helped, but........//an idea for a new video// #learnElixir
What a nonsense comment.
@@der.Schtefan Tell me you've never made a native app without telling me you've never made a native app.
Threading is used extensively in backend and gamedev, which is much more than just C++/Rust. I guess your statement makes sense if you only count frontend/web development
First rule of mobile development (so Obj-C, Swift, Java, Kotlin) is never to block the main thread. iOS and Android have had concurrency/threading systems as core parts of their SDKs basically forever (GCD and now Swift Concurrency on iOS and Handlers and now Kotlin Coroutines) and are a core part of mobile development for basically every engineer working on these apps.
The idea that only a few Rust and C++ devs understand concurrency and that everyone else is constantly blocking the main/UI thread is absurd.
The idea of dark silicon was prevalent in the spacecraft electronics industry in the early ‘80s when I used it. Much cruder though. Here the issue was using TTL logic (all that was available for radiation hardened work) for complex functions. We would cycle power to individual chips to reduce the power demands on a very limited supply.
Love your videos! I'm a PhD student currently working on the RF test and measurement side of semiconductors at the on wafer level (e.g. S parameters, load pull, NVNA etc) - would be great to see a video on that at some point if possible!
Which university & Industry?
went from 16 mhz to 2 ghz in a bit over 10 years, still a good effort
Fantastic effort, pushing the boundaries until it was clear it was a losing battle to push them any further.
Great, and it's good that Dennard receives the credit that he deserves as he never mentioned in the press due to his obsession with "Moore's law" due to Intel's marketing machine.
Dude.... fascinating. This is everything i wanted to know about CPUs as a kid (~90s), but didn't have the resources to investigate 🙏
3:25 when we shrink the transistor we also generally lower the capacitance. This is a good piece of the lower-power story. Great video as always!
Optical is going to be interesting.
Writing parallel software is challenging. It has also taken a long time for the tools to catch up with the need to support it well.
These kind of difficulties always stimulate new inventions.
I'm pretty sure if we had these 50GHz chips the systems wouldn't perform 10x faster, also because much less effort put in software optimization, and less hardware acceleration that CPUs / GPUs are stuffed with today.
Parallel computing development was an obvious thing anyway, as it reflects the way heavy multi-tasking systems work.
Evolution in nature also followed this curve. Nerves started slow, but sped up using electrochemical reactions. It was a dead end. Nature didn't give up on speeding up neurons as much as discovered the advantages of parallelism. Your brain is a relatively slow communicating, but massively parallel machine.
It's also analog which is where the "it's a computer" paradigm breaks down.
@@brodriguez11000computers aren't necessarily digital. Early computers, and some today, are analog too. Our brains are indeed analog computers, just with a structure we don't understand
@@brodriguez11000 So is AI.
I think this is my favorite video so far! You condensed so much about why it’s hard to design semiconductors into a short and interesting presentation. Well done! 👏👏👏
You don't have to guess that Intel chased clock speed above all else. This was stated at the time. To crank up the clock they had to introduce long pipelines. Most code could not keep those pipelines filled. So a few pieces of code that fit the pipeline architecture well ran blazingly fast, but most code spent much its time stalled. They started losing to AMD on real world performance, and were saved by the guys from Isreal, who had been working on a different approach.
Semiconductor companies being saved by the guys from Isreal could be the basis for an interesting video. It has happened multiple times. Its unclear if the guys from Isreal are smarter, or if far from headquarters they are not pressured to pursue dumb goals.
Intel's Isreal-based researchers were charged with designing smaller, more efficient cores for laptops, so they didn't have the area, gate or cooling budgets for deep pipelining. This gave them the latitude to explore alternative approaches. However, most everyone really paying attention could see Intel's P4 designs were chasing pure "bigger number = better" Ghz which sound impressive to the clueless but are, in reality, pretty terrible across broad workloads. Those deep pipeline cache stalls, prediction and speculative execution misses just crushed performance.
All that deep pipelining infrastructure also consumed a lot of gates on its own. Not doing most of it freed up a gates which could be applied toward doing real work.
It might also be a case of “Thinking outside of the Box” in more ways than one.
@@MarkishMr They were chasing, as well as Intel fans were chasing. All anyone could talk about at the time were faster single core. Understandable because single thread was easy to understand and do. Concurrency took a skilled programmer a lot more work to pull off effectively.
I still think there's algorithmic and OS/language optimizations that are yet to be realized... As an old school embedded programmer I'm convinced that at least half of the clock cycles of a modern PC are wasted with bloat... but I'm probably oversimplifying the problem...
Open a Rust or Go binary in a debugger if you want to see what 99% wasted cycles looks like. Bloated mess.
Depends what you mean by bloat, lots of spent cycles on non critical things but that's a tradeoff with simpler programming, more io, more OS features etc
If you consider that anything more advanced than windows XP is bloat then you can indeed run a whole PC in the single watts range
You are most likely correct. The problem that has crept into all software is that we have the memory to add an extra layer of configuration to everything, so software never resolves to a "finalized automation" of the kind that you get in the embedded world, where every byte and clock cycle can be properly accounted for. Instead we have a vast infrastructure of dynamically adjusting budgets for computing resources, just-in-time recompilation, abstracted programming interfaces, fallbacks, etc. That spills over into even more incidental complexity. It's known that as software gets bigger, more of the code "goes dark" - it either executes once or never, while the "hot spots" become much tighter in nature - tiny sections of assembly code that are hammered. But when there's an excess of configuration, there's no easy way to get at the hot spots.
It's related to Conway's Law effects - it's not that we need all that configuration for an application, it's that having it is a way of designing for an adverse environment where you don't know who or what your program talks to, so everyone assumes the worst.
“Nature hates a void”. As the architecture (hardware) makes improvements and optimizations software is there to eventually occupy the newly discovered space - also an oversimplification. 😄
Not wasting your time isn't "bloat". Making the most of a finite resource in which you have better things to do than banging electrons.
If you weren't around in the 90's you won't understand just how crazy it was. On average CPUs got 10% better IPC/year 50% higher clocks per year. Power went from about 3 watts to about 60 watts. CPUs went went from being bare ceramic packages without a heat sink to having a tiny 8000 RPM earbleedingly awful fan to having larger sinks with low speed fans. Graphics cards went from being a pure 2D affair without any acceleration, to including more and more GUI acceleration features, to rasterizing and texturing triangles to per pixel lighting and hardware T&L to having per pixel programmable shaders in the early 00's. Games had not settle on what they could be and settled into making basically a reskin of the same AAA action-adventure type game with different art assets and settings and the same basic gameplay. Developers were trying to one up each other with all kinds of crazy new ideas throghout the 90's. A lot of it was predictably awful; some of it was pure magic (like ultima underworld; that games is like finding rabbit fossils in precambrian rock; it just shouldn't exist and shouldn't be possible on a 386). Without a technology to replace silicon CMOS and being a new exponential leg of a technological S-curve there will never be anything like it again.
To underpin just how crazy the 90's was. If Dennard scaling had magically continued, somehow, we'd have 1.6 THz single core CPUs with 80 kW TDP. That's the exponential we were on for over a decade and 2002-2005 felt like crashing into a brick wall. In the 90's most people defined their hardware by the clock speed; it was nearly synonymous with performance. Before "netburst" only really cyrix was an outlier with terrible IPC. For marketing reasons it was obvious why intel did what they did. They had pulled that same rabbit out of the hat a dozen times before; if they could do it again and AMD did not they'd be years ahead. If they tried it and failed, at least they'd still have higher clocks and manage to sell some CPUs on outdated metrics.
I cannot agree more, the 90s was the time of my late teens/early adulthood and it was just crazy and the time I made software development my professional career. It was a wild-west feeling, always something exciting new thing comeing and going.
And extra credit for mentioning Ultima Underworld, I was speechless when I started it the first time on my 386DX-40... magic did not do it justice for its time.
I worked in a computer shop at the time.
Processors were hot potatoes, every week unsold lost tangible value.
Dissipators went from tack-on gimmicks to frame-mounted behemoths.
Software spell checking went from luxury to mainstream.
My favourite expression of this is that singlecore performance of my home computer rose about a million times (counting IPC) in the first half of my computing life, and ten in the last. (ZX81 flops -> 2GHz P4 ->12600)
At the time multi core processors came out, multi processor computing, hence multi core but each processor in a separate housing unit, had been around for quite a few years for not only simulation but real life applications such as Photoshop, Maya, 3D rendering including visualisation of MRIs in the medical industry. On Intel, MIPS, Sparc, Power PC and Alpha platforms. On workstations and servers.
Dear sir, I love you videos. The information is presented so clearly and thoroughly that I feel I learn and retain something new after every one I watch! But, please, I have one request I feel should be very easy for you to implement.
Could you PLEASE increase the volume of your voiceovers? In order for me to comfortably hear you I need to raise the volume of my TV to a level that makes the ads obscenely loud.
On my TV any volume level over 10 and the ads are ear splittingly loud. I need the volume at 13 to 15 on your videos to hear you clearly. I have to watch with the TV remote in my hand, finger on the mute button, ready to press it the instant an ad starts to play. If I'm off by just a few seconds the effect is so jarring my wife will hear it 3 rooms over through 2 closed doors. And if it wakes the baby, well, my day/night is just ruined, lol!
Thank you for all the amazing information you've provided me on so many topics that I find interesting! I truly do appreciate the effort you put in to these videos. If you could fix this one issue you would make me a VERY happy man!
Thank you for your time and keep up the great work.
2:42 LOL, how many stopped the video to rewatch this?
I didn't notice that. Thanks for pointing it out! 😄✌️
Indeed, his wit is as sharp as his intellect. One of the best tech info channels on YT.
Yeah, great piece of editing and wit !
11:45 is there really no updated version of this graph? It ends in 2015, which is now ten years ago. Would be very interesting to see how things developed since then.
Replying to see if someone searches for one
babe wake up new End of Dennard Scaling just dropped
I'm so happy Sunday
Played out. Go back to bed
How long are people gonna push this stupid forced meme
@@colin351 babeless comment
Until it stops getting likes tbf
Last time I was this early Moore’s Law was still kicking
Hell yeah
An Asianomtery video is always welcome!
9:45 Hence we still struggle to reach 60fps in Crysis Ascension level
Not even zen 5 with v-cache? :p
No amount of CPU's can beat bad optimization.
Would we have GPUs today if our CPUs were able to keep scaling in Ghz? Yes, because we started getting GPUs when CPUs were still very slow, around 100mhz if I remember back to when I bought the first voodoo card. So GPUs then just started speeding up as the CPUs sped up as well. By the time we had 4ghz CPUs, we had already had 5 or 6 generations of GPU.
If CPUs just kept getting faster, the GPUs would have gotten faster alongside them, and developers would have included bigger and bigger polygon counts.
The first PCs had to have adapter cards to have video output. Those cards had chips on them that could be considered GPUs although display adapters could only produce text. So GPUs were a thing at the very beginning. It took almost 10 years from introduction for CPUs to reach 100 MHz. The first PC was only 4.77 MHz.
Saymour Cray had a solution for the frequency bareer for CPUs back in early 90's however he was ignored. I guess that all that investment in silicon chip manufacturing must be milked to the maximum and this is still present to this day. I am talking about moving away from silicon and using galium, germanium, carbon etc etc.
You are a video making machine! So, so good.
Thanks for covering this fun topic!
13:50 This sounds very familiar. After the P4 (and some minor iterations) came the Pentium D. All the magazines and reviewers complained of it getting very warm. The Core 2Duo which followed getting a better response from the pundits.
The closing minutes of the vid is great, Intel opened the door for AMD
1996 to 2001 was really an incredible era in computing. I remember 50 or 100mhz computers being norm then doubling frequency every year then on. There were even tv commercials around that time of a guy driving home, from the electronics store, with a new latest model PC and seeing a billboard announcing the next generation. It did seem like that at the time.
Then, around that time, accelerated graphics were also created and advancing. DirectX versions advanced at around the same rate as CPUs. You had to buy a new videocard every year or so because the next generation supported new compute features supported in the latest DirectX version.
Man I love this channel, thank you for taking me back to my engineering lectures.
I cant help being happy, that you have started saying - correctly - D-RAM, instead of dram. Great channel btw!
Great vid it’s making me hungry for the next chapter - how arm chips created better performance
I actually clicked on this video because I've never heard of Dennard Scaling 😆
Dr. Colwell gave a talk at my university a few weeks ago. He mentioned talking seeing the CEO of INTEL in the airport sometime ago and how the CEO was bragging about how their new chip that was supposed to be so great because of all the cores. He just told the CEO that the product wasn’t good because it was built off a bunch of bad early parts and was too complex and inefficient to actually be viable. He mentioned how he was correct in the end.
It was an incredible talk about many things and this was just a very brief story he told. As a sophomore EE student it was so amazing to hear from him though.
always chasing the next big bottleneck
8:24 The funniest part of this video. 53 GHz years ago. That would have been something!
That policy of Intel at that time still echoes today...for the worse. Today's news you tell me...
Nice video.
4:36 Though, I am pretty sure that "K" is actually κ, or the Greek minuscule letter kappa. Not "K".
Colwell's oral history is amazing. Particularly the chapters about Itanium and VLIW. Honestly it's worth a video on its own.
Another great lecture. Thanks, guy.
I'd like to comment regarding the Pentium 4. It was a poor performer. I had several systems using these processors back then and they were noticeably sluggish. I am told that this sluggishness was a result of the deep pipelines in the processor. For example, I remember a Microsoft engineer at the time stating that a thread switch consumed roughly 7500 cycles because the pipelines and instruction caches got dumped and had to be refilled. My understanding that the follow-on after the Pentium 4 used older Pentium 3 technology. Anyway, I was not impressed that Colwell was a champion of the Pentium 4. To me, it was a failed processor.
What are we going to see ten years from now? How many cores/threads are in a mid-range PC? Is the increase in cores/threads - how long does that increase in parallelism increase?
Utilizing parallelism is very very hard. But currently the bottleneck is the memory. It's possible to design a faster processor but feeding them with data could not keep up. So ten years from now most likely memory will be integrated in the CPU package. There are already CPU and GPU architectures that do this. It will become a lot more common in the future.
Cache sizes are going to get much, much larger to reduce latency, because system memory is simply too slow and modern processors waste a ton of cycles waiting for it. Adding more cores isn't really going to help much- the tasks that can be near-infinitely parallelized are already better shipped off to a device with a GPU-like architecture. We may start seeing consumer chips with a gigabyte of L3 cache or more.
@7:37 he said “turn of the century” and it sent me. I’m old.
One of the best TH-cam channel
So to summarize (and compare), Moore's law is about the evolution of transistor numbers in a chip over time, while Dennard's law is about how transistor size is related to speed and voltage?
Interesting how it started with memory and jumped to CPU, considering memory doesn't push barriers as hard as CPU.
Brilliant clip! Thank you so much for sharing that.
I really appreciate your videos! Could you please do a video on the IBM Power series of processors following the dissolution of the AIM alliance to present?
Great video! Made my Tuesday!
Can the "Dark Silicon" problem be solved just by cooling the chip enough?
Phase-change cooling isn't really practical for daily use, and without it the absolute best you can do is the temperature transfer rate compared to ambient temperature. Air cooling and water cooling both run into this roadblock
Better cooling can help, but we are hitting physical limits.
I do expect liquid in direct chip contact to generalize. Thermal conductance alone just doesn't cut it any more.
(Passive) phase-change is powerful, and especially keeps T° range small, helping local expansion strain.
Active, below-ambient seems just forever too expensive & unreliable.
damn dude some genuine quality content, keep it up
It would be a great follow up to hear the tale of the Pentium M and how it evolved into the Core series!
The concept leads to Bucket Brigade Devices, the mainstay of "Analog Delay" guitar effects pedals.
Of all the random things to see in my feed, a Socket 423 proc was not expected
Is it ironic that Intel had big news today and you released this video? 😁
Thx great breakdown🎉
Well done, thanks!
overclockers using liquid nitrogen often go above 4GHz so I guess the cooling tech needs more advancement to break the power wall
And you know what is still shitty? Having to listen to people that insist on having the latest multi-core machine while they're still using single-core software. Memory management isn't the best of that piece of software either. Take a 100 MB drawing (it's all vectors, so this should be a lot smaller anyway, their drawing format must suck), you need at least 24 GB of memory, otherwise it starts swapping to disk, and then it's plainly unusable. autocad is in an incredible load of toss.
It's 2024. There are no latest single-core machines, unless you're talking about microcontrollers.
Love this channel ❤
Pentium 4 was a dream for me at 10 years old. My friend had one and command and conquer generals ran like a dream on it
Really? I remember Athlon was the the rage for builders and pentium was hotter and better on the Intel benchmarks for some reason. 🤔
Pentium 4, all you needed was a fast Nvidia card !
You bought Core Duo, the Quad Core extreme ? better !
Pentium4 was a great way to heat your home. as a space heater it was great. the thermal efficiency was basically absent.
I was building desktops back then for friends and they always wanted a $300 graphics card with a nVidia chip on it. I said shit I should buy $1000 of that stock! I did, that was 2001 :). I bought Intel and AMD too. I wish I would have put all $3000 on nvda
So educational!
Colwell, not Cowell! Happens all the time.
The technical marvels that let me shot virtual bad guys on my computer screen never cease to amaze.
when we can master cooling we can get our 53 GHz cores
Ill openly admit it. I too have wondered what today's tech would bring if a 1 MEGA CORE cpu was made LOL
Your oversimplified the length speed relation because all electric field moves at c but the change in electric field induces a voltage the other way it is called self inductances in L (Henry) and that should also decrease when the gate gets smaller.
Smaller transistor= smaller impedance= faster switching.
c is irrelevant here because the material facilitating solid-state electron propagation constrains the field-strength.
Boomers developed business methodology that has put all of humanity on its end path. All your videos demonstrate this glaring reality. Thank you, boomers.
If you wait long enough you'll be in the stone age consumer group vector.
Prescott was the last of the speed demons. It was sooooo hot.
"Thusly"
from the time they claimed dennard scaling is going to end, until now, we got +2 ghz... not bad xD
Moore's law has never been a law because it's finite.
The End
Very interesting.
Kind of a silly thing to name after someone. Like: if you shrink everything proportionally, it will work the same!
That seems like the first thing anyone would try . . .
It's not necessarily true. In fluid dynamics if you scale everything down the Reynolds number changes. So it needs to be proven that there is no similar factor happening in microelectronics.
@kazedcat and a proof that it doesn't work would be more note worthy than finding out it works just fine 😂
It wasn’t obvious at the time because it was considered impossible. Recall the remark that Dennard’s suggestion engendered laughter.
@@glennac I agree but that means there's more to the story. It was tried in the past and failed. Why was that?
Yep
I'm ready for my 53ghz CPU
Could dennard scaling fix cars..
Isn't the switching speed due to lower input capacitance (gate to source and gate to drain) due to reduced area. I dont think the few micrometer distance reduction makes much difference as the field will b
propagate near the speed of light
okok
Dennard at IBM ! He knew, shrink it, not a miracle at all, the k factor !
Dennard needs Moores scaling 😂
We're at the point we have to take advantage of quantum tunneling versus fighting it
@ralanham76 absolutely 💯 👍
@@ralanham76We are already taking advantage of quantum tunneling. The power wall is mostly a classical physics problem not a quantum physics problem.
Yes.
Last time I was this early The Law of Gravity was just a mere suggestion
Sum up: 2000-2014 or so, clock speed rule. Actually 1985+. Long pause of clocks,. Need to push them now to thz and beyond.
@@ralanham76 We have quite a lot of it better, but ok
make netburst great again
Concurrency conschmerrency.
Erlang would have helped, but........//an idea for a new video// #learnElixir
9:45 just in time for ps3,x360 and wii,and the reason why wii u was shit
Your videos fall into 2 categories for me - interesting as historical/engineering matter, and totally incomprehensible electronics things. So, apologies for unsubbing and resubbing so many times.
Below 10 mins gang 👇
Hh
first
The memory wall is the basis of the energy wall. John - are you checking your incoming e-mail? It's been 2 weeks since I sent you an e-mail.