Why can’t companies like Apple (AppleSilicon) or other ARM chip making companies just make really big chips that would outperform anything and everything we currently have? Disregarding battery life and heat issues, what about a laptop that is only one mega chip that takes up all the inside?
In: Technology
People haven’t covered yet the other side of why you can’t just have one laptop-filling chip (besides die yield itself). Chips require support hardware. For example on a motherboard around the CPU slot you’ll see all sorts of capacitors and chokes and what have you, because part of a motherboard’s job is to provide the power chips need — and that includes the right voltage, and very stable.
Plus, modularity. In theory sure you could bake the CPU, GPU, RAM, Storage, all that into some ultra-hyper megachip (we already do that to an extent sometimes, it’s called System On a Chip, shortened to SoC). But what if you wanted to add RAM or switch to a bigger hard drive because they’re inadequate? You either have to buy a whole new humongous chip or a whole new laptop.
But even then it wouldn’t fill the entire laptop, because it still would need support hardware and connectors, and because a Chip with all that stuff wouldn’t need to *be* that big. In fact, if you research CPUs alone across different generations, even for having more and more stuff packed in them and being immensely more powerful than say 20 years ago, they’re getting *smaller,* and as counterintuitive as it may seem that shrinking actually *aids* in becoming more efficient and more powerful.
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