this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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I'm wondering how much further size reductions in lithography technology can take us before we need to find new exotic materials or radically different CPU concepts.
We've already been doing radically different design concepts, chiplets being a massive one that jumps to mind.
But also things like specialised hardware accelerators, 3D stacking, or the upcoming backside power delivery tech.
I mean, chiplets are neat..but they are just the same old CPU, just in lego. and thats mostly just to increase yields vs monolothic designs. Same with accelerators, stacking, etc.
I mean radical new alien designs (Like quantum CPUs as an example) since we have to be reaching the limit of what silicon and lithography can do.
Photonic is the game changer. Putting little LEDs on chips and making those terabyte per second interconnects with low heat and long range and better signal integrity
This is what I'm talking about. This kind of weird, new shit, to overcome the limits we have to be running into by now with the standard silicon and lithography that we've been using and evolving for 40 years.
I don't think it is mostly just the same CPU with a slight twist. It'd be mind-blowing tech if you showed it to some electrical engineers from 20, 15, shit even 10 years ago. Chiplets were and are a big deal, and have plenty of advantages beyond yield improvements.
I also disagree with stacking not being a crazy advancement. Stacking is big, especially for memory and cache, which most chip designs are starved of (and will get worse as they don't shrink as well)
There's more to new, radical, chip design than switching what material they use. Chiplets were a radical change. I think you're only not classifying them as an "alien" design as you're now used to them. If carbon nanotube monolithic CPU designs came out a while ago, I think you'd have similarly gotten used to them and think of them as the new normal and not something entirely different.
Splitting up silicon into individual modules and being able to trivially swap out chiplets seems more alien to me than if they simply moved from silicon transistors to [material] transistors.
Well being as the diameter of a silicon atom is 0.2 nm I'm guessing not long