In The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Hamming gives this amazing sigmoidal formulation for the growth rate of computing power: e^(22(1-e^(-t/20))), with t=0 in 1943. That predicts 2.2 GHz for 2019, with is rather remarkably close to where we are.
Interesting. I guess that makes sense - if the signal is propagating say ~3 millimeters (?) even at ~lightspeed it's going to take 1/100 of a nanosecond. At 3 GhZ, that's 1/33rd of a clock cycle. Am I understanding the issue correctly?
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Broadly. So for a 10 GHz clock and a 2cm die, the propagation delay (ctr to edge) becomes ~1/3 of a clock cycle... Add in rise time distortions and it's a serious issue.
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I see. Thinking aloud: omitting constants, you want L f << c, where L is the linear dimension of the chip, and f is the clock frequency. If the characteristic size of elements on the chip is d (more or less the feature size), and you want N elements, you have N d^2 = L^2...
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