Where's cpu makers going ?

If you're talking about x86, then yes. If you're talking about CPUs in general, no. Not all CPUs are like that. That's only in the MHz-competitive PC world. On the RISC side ARMs are quite impressive especially if you look outside the Xscale family. Some of the low end ARMs are smaller than what PICs used to be. If you look at microcontrollers then it's more impressive. People are starting to package micros in small 3 or 4 legged ICs the size of an SMD resistor.

That's what we're getting at. The point is they don't need to shrink it no more, just improve the power/thermal issues, that will beat the competitors !!!

I've come from 8K core store, 1 M disc drives, diode microcode matrix boards, the 4004 etc. 1 micron technology developed in Rutherford labs... I see fully integrated microcontrollers, as in ram rom I/O in high density being the norm.And I don't mean 1K :) Then bond it to an LCD panel.....

ehhh no, what drives the power consumption up is speed and transistors, not shinking. shinking should make it use less power, but it also means its capable of faster speed and room for more transistors. So everytime something is gained with a shink it is lost in running it faster and with more transistors to get more perfomance.

shinking yesterdays cpu and doing nothing else just makes it smaller and cheaper to produce ..

-Lasse

Agree, but what's the advantage when the heatsink + fan occupies a volume of thousands times bigger than the cpu itself ?

If there exist a CPU just few hundreds time bigger than let say the C2D for example, having same performance with no extra heat sink or aided cooler, can you tell who's winner ?

Look at the last few models of processors. Each has used _less_ power than the ones before. What then happens, is that the speed is then ramped up as far as they can go within the bounds of the existing cooling. The cooling requirements of current CPU's, are almost identical with those of seven or eight years ago. If you look at units like the AMD64, the slower models of these, can run without fans at all. The smaller dies make the chips cooler, but then 'marketting' pushed the speed up as far as it can go within the bounds of the acceptable cooling. A lot of the decision is yours. Take a standard CPU, and _underclock_ it to about 1/2 to 3/4 of it's rated performance, and done properly, you can turn off the cooling fan. You get performance that is much faster than anything available five years ago, and a tiny fraction of the power consumption as well. There are several specialist suppliers doing exactly this.

Best Wishes

I would like to have such thing, the CPU can run same speed same calculation power as the current cpus with no heatsink + noisy fan

We can see they "push" the performance and "pull" out the thermal, in this case the desktop industry "might" bite the bullet

What about the heatsink ? After all, we have no improvement? :)))

Ooop, yes indeed they do have liltle bitty gain to five years ago Thanks for sharing your thoughs

I imagine that a bent bit of metal is a lot cheaper than a similar sized area of processor silicon, so making the actual processor smaller makes it cheaper.

For the likes of Intel and AMD, the main reason for making the chip smaller is to make it run faster. The signals propagate across the processor at a finite speed, so when you are clocking your processor at a few GHz the time taken for the clock signal to propagate across the chip is actually a significant fraction of the clock cycle. Also, making the thing physically smaller will reduce parasitic inductance and capacitance, which again will allow it to run faster.

For the PC market, the physical size of the processor isn't really an issue since most of the PC case is empty space anyway. If you want physically small and/or low power processors they do exist, though obviously they don't have the raw power of Intel's latest devices.

This is one of the smallest I know of.

If you want more processing power without the need for a heatsink have a look at these:

Just a few hundred times bigger would probably mean a lot more expensive to make

Why are you so anti the heatsink?. Even the smallest chips have these, and need them. They are cheap, and small.

Again, why so worried about the heatsink?. I have three systems here based on this sort of technology. Look at industrial embedded PC's. The heatsink, in most examples is the case. Less than half a dozen cubic inches of aluminium. Even a chip dissipating a couple of watts, needs a heatsink of some sort. It may simply be the PCB itself, but the heat has to be got away from the die. Making the die bigger, makes this problem worse, not better, and makes the chip vastly more expensive (much more than linearly to the area, since the probability of making a good chip, falls). Try buying a large die chip, like a 10cm^2 CCD element, and you will understand why this is not done...

Best Wishes

Every instruction takes a certain amount of energy, although the energy per instruction might be falling they are doing more instructions per second with a lot of instructions per second you need a big heatsink, no matter how big or small the cpu itself.

The same processor can be run at a lower voltage and speed and not realy need much of a heatsink.

The problem is software that is going backawrds, getting larger and larger, needing more and more instructions to do much the same thing.

Colin =^.^=

That's true for dynamic power, used when switching the transistors. But static power is depedant on the leakage, and that goes up with smaller transistors. Depending on the type of device and application, static power can be more relevant than dynamic power.

The advantage of the heatsink + fan is speed. You can have a very compact system without a single heatsink if you're willing to run at

A bigger CPU running at the speed of the Core2 Duo would actually need an even bigger heatsink. Core2s are extremely cool in comparison to other similar performing CPUs like the P4s. That's the effect of a lot of things, process shrinkage is just one of them.

To reduce heat you have to reduce MHz. But marketing isn't willing to and newer games keeps insisting on using up more. There are architectures out there which kicks ass at low MHz - the PowerPC is one, Niagra is another one and of course the ARM family. They thrive in markets which requires high performance but where the consumer isn't told or is generally ins't aware about the processor's MHz - markets like high speed DSL modems, smartphones, set-top boxes etc. But they fail utterly in the follow-the-herd PC market where consumers usually opt for higher MHz even if the competitor can perform the same or sometimes better with less "MHz".

Engineers have lots of solutions to the heat problem. But not much for the x86 because marketing and the consumer isn't willing to give up on the MHz myth (Intel is trying to but consumers still isn't buying the idea. Besides, benchmarks are often confusing, it's easier to compare MHz).