How to build more powerful chips without frying the data centre

Blackwell’s putting together of different parts show the limits to which chipmakers must push their technology to boost computing power while keeping energy consumption in check. Over the course of a year one of these megachips, which cost $70,000, will consume 5.2mwhrs—about half the energy of an average American household. Adding more transistors is the best way to boost a chip’s processing power: communication within a single chip may be a thousand times faster and use a hundred times less energy than shuttling data between chips. But since Dennard scaling hit a wall in the mid-2000s, shrinking transistors has not significantly improved energy efficiency. Gordon Moore suggested two other tricks to pack in more transistors: increase the die size (ie, make chips bigger) and use “device and circuit cleverness”. In 1971 the 4004, an Intel processor, had a die size of 12 square mm. Current lithographic tools cannot build chips bigger than 800 square mm, about the size of each Blackwell die. Circuit cleverness is the only other path.