SEMICONDUCTOR SCALING HAS FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED
For about fifty years, IC designers have been relying on different types of semiconductor scaling to achieve gains in performance. Best known is Moore’s Law which predicted that the number of transistors in a given silicon area and clock frequency would double every two years. This was combined with Dennard scaling which predicted that with silicon geometries and supply voltages shrinking, the power density would remain the same from generation to generation, meaning that power would remain proportional to silicon area. Combining these effects, the industry became used to processor performance per watt doubling approximately every 18 months. With successively smaller geometries, designers could use similar processor architectures but rely on more transistors and higher clock frequencies to deliver improved performance.