Technology: A Closer Look
Basic driver of performance advances 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 ? (slower as speed decreases)
- Number of transistors improves like ?? (or faster as die size increases)
Performance increases > 100x per decade; clock rate x, rest of increase is due to transistor count
Current microprocessor: 1/3 compute, 1/3 cache, 1/3 off-chip connect
But of course you could change this natural “sweet spot”