Gadgetory

all other things being equal the more transistors you have on a processor but more features and performance again and ever since the 1970s manufacturers have been finding ways to shove more and more transistors onto a single chip by making the transistors smaller in fact the widely quoted Moore's law that anticipated that the number of transistors on a CPU would double roughly every two years held true for decades but in recent years Moore's law has started to look more like Moore's pipe dream as it's becoming harder and harder to keep shrinking transistors down due to the chemical properties of silicon so how do we solve this problem and keep making our computers and our gadgets faster and faster well although the industry has been looking at making smaller transistors on materials other than silicon as we briefly discussed in this video another idea that seems to be catching on is using something called chip le'ts now traditionally the die or the part of a CPU that contains the transistors is manufactured as a single monolithic piece so there are practical limits to how big you can make them before the likelihood of a fatal defect landing on your die becomes too high by contrast chip 'lets are modular mini dies that can be combined into one CPU package to improve performance but your main hold on a minute here you guys might say well what's the point of all this if the transistors are the same size anyway aren't you just adding an assembly step and making it take up more room well as it turns out oftentimes chiclet based CPUs are indeed larger think of AMD's new epic series of server processors as an example however they're also hugely advantageous when you consider yields so if you're not familiar with the concept of yields here's what it means CPUs are manufactured on large silicon wafers and that manufacturing process isn't perfect which means that on a given wafer there will be some number of defects so if we take our wafer and divide it into smaller Chiclets it means less wasted silicon for each defect and it also makes it easier to take the chip 'lets that are functional but that don't perform as well and combine those into lower end products salvaging back some of the cost on a large scale this leads to faster manufacturing and lower costs with significant real world benefits in fact AMD's epic CPUs only cost about half as much thanks to chip 'lets versus using one large die now although Chiclets are more common in the high-end desktop and server markets right now the technology will most likely trickle down to the consumer space such as with AMD's rumored upcoming 16 core rise in cpu that's going to put pressure on Intel to reduce their prices which might force them to pursue chip --let based designs as well another fun benefit is that chip 'lets also allow manufacturers to separate out parts of the CPU that don't handle pure number crunching such as input and output blocks as it's often harder to shrink those parts of a processor down so then you can just tack those bits on separately and attach as many chip 'lets as you want connecting them together with a high-speed interface like AMD's infinity fabric now of course the obvious drawback of size still does exist but until we run up against the limits imposed by signals moving at the speed of light within a microprocessor chip let's do seem to be one of the best paths forward speaking of best paths forward the best path for your business might be a fresh books account fresh books is the small business accounting software that's custom-built for how you want to work and it's a simple way whether you're a small business owner or a freelancer to be more productive more organized and to get paid faster with fresh books you can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds you can set up online with just a couple of clicks and get paid up to four days faster you can see when your client has seen your invoice and put an end to the guessing games and you can take the whole experience with you on the go with their fully featured apps for iOS and Android so for an unrestricted 30-day free trial go to freshbooks comm slash tech quickie will have that link below and just enter tech quickie in the how did you hear about us section so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future fast as possible and make sure that you subscribe so you don't miss any future tech wiki's or even the past ones don't miss those either