Technology: A Closer Look
Basic advance is decreasing feature size ( ??)
- Circuits become either faster or lower in power
Die size is growing too
- Clock rate improves roughly proportional to improvement in ?
- Number of transistors improves like ????(or faster)
Performance > 100x per decade; clock rate 10x, rest of increase is due to transistor count
How to use more transistors?
- Parallelism in processing
- multiple operations per cycle reduces CPI
- Locality in data access
- avoids latency and reduces CPI
- also improves processor utilization
- Both need resources, so tradeoff
Fundamental issue is resource distribution, as in uniprocessors
CPI = Clock Cycles per Instruction