Why do they not make a giant cpu with 10b transistors?

Guessing, I imagine it's due to heat concerns. Also, it would be expensive.

It'd probably be very difficult to cool and supercomputers use lots of small processors as far as I'm aware.

They are probably harder to manufacture as well.
 
cost and power consumption.
the cost will be way over 5x more than sandybridge-e because of how processors are made. you wont be able to get very many out of the circular wafer. there will be far more broken processors, because there are far more transistors to be built wrong.

also, with 5x the transistors you will get at least 5x the power consumption and 5x the heat (it might be exponential growth, im not sure). you'll have to have a massive watercooling system as standard with the processor
 
Tibbz2 said:
Maybe because it would be ****-off expensive?
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+1 for first post brilliancy.

sure you'd have to watercool the top and air cool the bottom of them, but think about the speeds! Besides, it's only a stupid idea, it took long enough to get processors to a nice tiny manageable size now, why would we want to take a step back?
 
Daichin said:
Guessing, I imagine it's due to heat concerns. Also, it would be expensive.

It'd probably be very difficult to cool and supercomputers use lots of small processors as far as I'm aware.

They are probably harder to manufacture as well.
Click to expand...

Supercomputers generally do use the same processors as you would find in a desktop - the last one I was using used magney-cours AMD processors and had a giant 1.5TB of RAM ;) I've also used one which used Xeons, and another which was based around the Cray architecture (thats not one you would find in a desktop PC).

As for why they don't just make the CPU die's larger (the die is the piece of silicon in the centre of the processor which actually has the transistors in them) is one of cost. Creating pure silicon wafers is an extraordinary expensive procedure, very time consuming as well - so in order to make back the maximal amount of money from selling the processors they have to fit as many die's on the wafers as possible.

Processors will read 10 billion transistors at some point in the future, as the size of the transistors is constantly being shrunk, at some point there will be 10b within the small size of the die - although increasing the number of transistors does not necessarily mean that processor will become more powerful - as I am sure you will have read the architecture of the CPU and the pipeline can also make a huge difference in the way that the CPU works.
 
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