I was reading online that CPU cores can be less than a square millimetre per core. I’m wondering if we are going to reach a limit with how small we can compress them.
In: Engineering
Not really. However, wafers will have flaws in them. Chips with flaws have to be discarded so chip yield goes down dramatically as die size increases. Also the instructions on single core can be pipelined like an automobile assembly plant and can also be run out of order to maximize efficiency, but you can only do this so much before you get down to the most fundamental steps. Lastly, you can increase the word size, but after 64 bits again you hit rapidly diminishing returns. Even with multiple cores you’re going to hit these kind of limits. For instance, you can only parallelize operations on a database so much before you can no longer guarantee internal consistency.
TL;DR: You can make it bigger but after a while it won’t help.
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