[HN Gopher] Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died
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Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died
Author : jnord
Score : 40 points
Date : 2024-10-03 22:03 UTC (56 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| osnium123 wrote:
| He passed away months ago. RIP. He seems like a class act from
| what I've heard.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| > 91
|
| I really hope I live as long as these guys. It's one thing to
| invent something useful, it's another to spend your life watching
| it grow.
| adharmad wrote:
| Roger Penrose is 93 and as sharp as a tack!
| monocasa wrote:
| This is the Dennard of Dennard Scaling, a chip scaling law that
| is arguably as important as Moore's Law.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling
|
| The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture was
| a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to, why the
| Cell processor never hit the 5Ghz it was supposed to, why we've
| been spending quite a bit of the transistor budget on more cores
| rather than a very fancy single CPU core of 10Bs of transistors,
| and why chips with lower thermal limits will see a lot of "dead
| silicon" where you can't actually light up the whole chip at once
| without melting it.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Dennard scaling, for people in the industry, was far more
| important than Moore's law when it was available.
|
| Moore made a high-level observation, but Dennard told you how
| to do it.
| cpldcpu wrote:
| Well, it's basically the technical implementation of Moore's
| law, since Moore's law is just an empirical observation. (And
| maybe also a self-fulfilling prophecy)
| scrlk wrote:
| RIP.
|
| I was surprised that it didn't get much attention on HN when the
| news broke back in April, considering Dennard's large
| contributions to technology.
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