: Why are computer CPUs the size they are? Wouldn’t making them bigger give way to more processing power without needing better technology?

Question

Edit : My first post to blow up. Crazy.

In: Technology

Answer 1

Yes, you could do that, and there are companies making chips the size of dinner plates. The problem is it is very very expensive.

To make a CPU you start with a piece of silicone about the size of a dinner plate and “print” your chip design on it as many times as it fits. So if you can put 1000 CPUs on your plate sized silicone now 1000 people pay for that batch rather than one person paying for the whole plate sized silicone.

*Slightly more technical details…A bigger chip is great for paralle computing or lots of cores (running lots of things together) but not every application/chip would benifit from scaling like that. But even for basic Nvidia chips, the faster one have a bigger die size (chip size).