Scaling & Power
The end of Dennard scaling, the physics of power, the cost of moving data
01
·Scaling & Power·★ MEMBER·9 min read
The Physics of Power — Why Lowering Voltage Pays So Much
Derive what one switching event costs, then read the dynamic power equation to see why voltage alone enters squared. From there: Dennard scaling and its end, the 60 mV/decade thermodynamic floor, dark silicon, and the resulting turn toward fixed-function circuits and low precision — ending with the arithmetic of what inference costs to run.
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·Scaling & Power·FREE·10 min read
What Moore's Law Actually Says — What Ended, and What Is Still Going
"Double every two years" was never a law of physics — it was a timetable the industry agreed to keep. Dennard scaling is what ended; cost is what slowed; density and going vertical are what continue. A ground-up tour through log axes, the flat-to-FinFET-to-GAA story, and the arithmetic of cost per transistor.
03
·Scaling & Power·★ MEMBER·10 min read
The Economics of Chiplets — We Split Dies Because We Cannot Build Them Big
Chips are split into chiplets not because splitting is faster but because a single large die cannot be built at a price anyone will pay. The reticle limit, the exponential in yield, cost per good die, the point where splitting starts to lose money, mixing process nodes, and UCIe as a standard for the seam.
04
·Scaling & Power·★ MEMBER·11 min read
Thermal Design from Scratch — The Wall in 3D Stacking Is Heat
Nearly all the power that enters a chip leaves it as heat. Temperature is set by a series stack of thermal resistances, and once you stack dies vertically the hottest layer heats up with the square of the layer count. Heat flux and hotspots, the lag that thermal mass introduces, and which term liquid cooling actually removes — picking up where the power budget left off.