[HN Gopher] The Rising Price of Power in Chips
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The Rising Price of Power in Chips
Author : rbanffy
Score : 79 points
Date : 2024-03-16 11:35 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (semiengineering.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (semiengineering.com)
| datameta wrote:
| In Figure 2 depicting 2.5D warping, why is 246C a relevant
| temperature? In my experience with IBM Power and Z systems, north
| of 85C is considered the high end already. What am I missing?
|
| Interesting article overall.
| mikewarot wrote:
| The picture shows temperatures up to 316K, which is 42 C.... so
| likely it's a typo for 46 (or 45?) centigrade.
|
| It's the repeating of an earlier mistake.[1] Which apparently
| partially arises from [2] which is behind a paywall.
|
| [1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ansys-
| receives-2021...
|
| [2] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Heterogeneous-
| Integrat...
| datameta wrote:
| Ah yes, that's it right there. Excellent sleuthing, thanks.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Great breakdown of current challenges.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| What hardware advances giveth, today's beyond-ridiculous-
| overweight software stacks taketh away.
| sliken wrote:
| I think of that as a win. Heavy software stacks create a demand
| for faster hardware and the market provides. Those of us with
| use cases that represent a tiny marketshare, but actually need
| the performance can do so with light software stacks.
|
| So the question is, how can we make the overweight software
| stacks even slower?
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| By going back to using interpreted languages. No more
| precompiled binaries where changing/adding patches and flags
| require full builds, just stream compiled/compressed source
| code directly to the target.
|
| You could also extern the software to a webserver and only
| cache small parts of the software on the client. Instead of
| gigabytes of install sizes you'll be required to have a 1 or
| 10 gbit network link to run and stream features as you're
| acessing them.
| mmoskal wrote:
| Oh come on! No one would ever do that!... Oh wait
| VelesDude wrote:
| Pffft!!! No it doesn't. By the way, here is my new 'Hello
| World' app, it is only 380MB + dependencies.
| bevekspldnw wrote:
| I'll replace my i9 workstations with an ARM equivalent as soon as
| I can. The power draw on i9 sucks, more so with the A6000
| running.
| error_logic wrote:
| The idea that ARM solves power issues seems a bit overblown and
| driven by Apple purchasing the most advanced nodes sooner than
| competitors, causing people to associate the efficiency gain
| with the architecture even though a lot of it is the silicon
| process.
|
| Edit: Also Apple can and does do away with legacy support which
| is less about the architecture and more about expectations of
| what is included vs. deprecated. The push to ARM seems like it
| will result in a loss of support and control in the users'
| hands (converting expectations of PCs into those of
| smartphones) but now I'm really into speculative territory...
| lend000 wrote:
| This is probably largely accurate -- not to mention the fact
| that Apple has been using efficiency cores longer than x86
| competitors.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > "The base leakage is lower than the previous technology, but
| the overall total power is higher," said Melika Roshandell,
| product management director at Cadence. "So at the end of the
| day, your thermal is going to be worse because you're packing a
| lot more transistors into one IC and you're pushing the
| performance.
|
| So why not match the previous gen's TDP and just use whatever
| gains you get from more efficiency?
|
| Back in the 90s 300W was considered extreme for an entire system,
| today just a single 4090 can pull a full kilowatt. This constant
| increase manufacturers have been pushing to compensate for
| diminishing returns is unsustainable and completely absurd.
| milesvp wrote:
| I'm curious about what is happening in the field of reversable
| computing. I haven't heard much about it at all in the last 20
| years. Basic information theory tells us that it takes energy to
| destroy information, so building ALUs that limit destroying
| information seems like a bit of a no brainer for attempting to
| create lower power (and heat) computing. The basic premise is
| that for any operation that loses info you store enough bits to
| allow the operation to run backwards. If you were clever about
| it, you could design your chips to only destroy bits in places
| that can be effectively as well. I'm sure reality gets in the way
| of pure theory, but I was sure that people were spending enough
| effort on the concept to have heard more about it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Reversible computing doesn't help wrt. static or leakage power,
| which is an increasing fraction of power draw in recent device
| nodes. It does help wrt. dynamic power, and can be implemented
| via charge-recovery logic - but this comes at a cost in area
| which increases static power.
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