[HN Gopher] Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died
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Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died
Author : jnord
Score : 330 points
Date : 2024-10-03 22:03 UTC (1 days 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!
| mhh__ wrote:
| Another: Ed Thorpe is similarly old and still going strong,
| last time I saw.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Built different.
| 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)
| mepian wrote:
| >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
|
| Around that time the PowerPC 970 aka G5 also failed to achieve
| 3 GHz, breaking the promise Steve Jobs publicly made at one of
| his keynotes for Apple.
| senkora wrote:
| Now there will be a twinge of sadness whenever I read a paper
| beginning with "Since the end of Dennard scaling...".
| bjourne wrote:
| "The end of Dennard scaling and the impending repeal of
| Moore's law" is very overused in very many papers. :)
| martinpw wrote:
| > The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture
| was a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to
|
| I've always been puzzled by this. Did Intel really not see this
| coming? I remember talking to Intel engineers way back when
| they were promising 10GHz in the near future - I think the
| codename at the time was Tejas. They seemed very confident. The
| architecture must have already been planned out - and yet it
| seems from the outside like the end of Dennard scaling was a
| total surprise to them?
| throwup238 wrote:
| Intel (and almost everyone else tbh) didn't fully appreciate
| how Denard scaling would play out at smaller nodes. They
| expected to keep lowering the transistor threshold voltage
| alongside transistor size but that became increasingly
| difficult due to leakage currents.
| osnium123 wrote:
| They also played with tricks like strained silicon on 90nm
| and high-k metal gate in 45 nm in order to boost
| performance and lower leakage respectively.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| It was a scaling law that had worked for three decades, and
| didn't show any signs of faltering. Even the most senior of
| the people building those designs had spent their entire
| careers in a world where it just was true.
|
| And then it went away in an instant.
| chx wrote:
| But when Dennard Scaling was in full swing, it was glorious. It
| only took six years to go from the original Pentium 60Hz on
| March 22, 1993 to Pentium III 600 MHz on August 2, 1999 and
| just a year later you could buy a 1GHz one.
| 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.
| gjvc wrote:
| (April)
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| Bob Dennard enjoyed Scottish country dancing, which is how I knew
| him. He was a kind and humble man. R.I.P.
| drzzhan wrote:
| RIP.
| snvzz wrote:
| Wonder if he had some choice words about ECC.
| petabyt wrote:
| Previous discussion from 4 months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40276464
| pkphilip wrote:
| May his memory live on
| danso wrote:
| Apparently he died 5 months ago, but seems to not have gotten a
| lot of notice on HN
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40276464
|
| Mainstream outlets did write obits at the time:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/technology/robert-dennard...
| ayaen wrote:
| Maybe its just me but here are people who made the world around
| us possible, and yet theu go unnoticed, in shadows, we seriously
| should celebrate and discuss scientists and technologists more,
| there are so many out there as important as Einstein, Lorenz
| Feynman and yet no where to be found in todays culture...
| vinaypai wrote:
| DRAM pioneers don't die, they just stop their refresh cycle.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Not to be confused with Bob Denard[1] with 1 "n".
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Denard
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