Intel's Tick-Tock Cycle Skips a Beat

New submitter Ramze writes: Several outlets are reporting on Intel's confirmation that it will make three generations of 14nm processors, delaying the switch to 10nm. The planned 14nm Kaby Lake processor marks the first time Intel has skipped the "tick" of a die shrink on its regular "tick/tock" cycle. Production of Cannonlake processors on 10nm has been pushed back to the second half of 2017 — likely due to manufacturing difficulties. Intel reported earlier this year that it may have to switch away from silicon to exotic materials such as indium gallium arsenide to make the next shrink to 7nm.

Comments

Re: Boring.

[Kjella]

I know - the transistor count should have enabled us to build neural nets to filter out inane AC comments by now.

Hardly. The brain has ~100 billion neurons and 100-500 trillion synapses, of which the latter is closest to a transistor. Leading CPU/GPUs have 5-9 billion transistors or less than 0.01% of that. Remember, we are approaching atom size but only in an extremely thin 2D slice. Current processors are about 100k*100k transistors big, if we could have the same density in three dimensions we'd have 100k^3 = 1000 trillion transistors in a 2.5 cm cube, comparable or even beyond the brain in density. I wouldn't try cooling it though as 100000k*100-250W power consumption means it'd consume >10 MW.

The brain only operates at ~100 Hz though, at least that's the rate synapses pass signals from neuron to neuron but it's not entirely clearly if that's equivalent to a CPU cycle or a network connection. Probably more like the latter as it seems each neuron has a form of local storage and programming of what to do. Like if you're looking at a picture and trying to determine if it's a cat people can reliably do that in half a second or 50 cycles which indicates quite a lot more processing per cycle and the neuron firing is more of a sub-result of a distributed process. So there's a lot more brain, though it runs much slower.