<story><title>Intel&apos;s 10nm Is Broken, Delayed Until 2019</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-cpu-10nm-earnings-amd,36967.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codemusings</author><text>Can someone explaing why it&amp;#x27;s important to increase the density instead of increasing the size of a CPU?&lt;p&gt;Knowing nothing about chip design I&amp;#x27;m probably thinking about this the wrong way but socket backwards compatability aside is it not feasible to simply increase the chip size? Is a higher density more rewarding?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nokinside</author><text>Power, heat  and the speed of electrical signal.&lt;p&gt;Power use increases quadratically with voltage.  You want small transistors to keep the voltage and power use from getting out of hand. You also need to increase voltage if you want to increase clock speed.&lt;p&gt;Electric signal travels in a conductor roughly 15 cm&amp;#x2F;nsec. With 3 GHz clock speed the electric signal travels travels roughly 50 mm in one clock cycle. Largest microchips are 30 mm across. You can&amp;#x27;t double the dimensions without dealing with the signal lag. Delivering the clock signal to every part of the chip in sync is already a problem. Modern microchips use lots of extra circuitry just to deliver the clock signal properly.</text></comment>
<story><title>Intel&apos;s 10nm Is Broken, Delayed Until 2019</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-cpu-10nm-earnings-amd,36967.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codemusings</author><text>Can someone explaing why it&amp;#x27;s important to increase the density instead of increasing the size of a CPU?&lt;p&gt;Knowing nothing about chip design I&amp;#x27;m probably thinking about this the wrong way but socket backwards compatability aside is it not feasible to simply increase the chip size? Is a higher density more rewarding?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dizzystar</author><text>I asked someone who worked on chips a similar question. The density helps connecting the parts. If the nodes aren&amp;#x27;t near each other, they have to move through other nodes to get from one to the other, and that process is &amp;quot;slow&amp;quot; in the world of chips.&lt;p&gt;I guess it&amp;#x27;s like trying to get from LA to SF. You could get to SF of you 10x&amp;#x27;d the size of earth, but it would still more than 10x as long despite having the same connections because you&amp;#x27;d need to stop for some extra connections to even make it.</text></comment>