Jon, I have to say thanks for your in-depth coverage and even more so for keeping your graphs onscreen to give me enough time to smash the pause button. Too many creators flash a graph up for 3 seconds and assume the viewer is completely au fait with the narrative.

Damn not listening to the engineers that work with the technology day in day out, caused them to miss an obvious pitfall?
Crazy

Intel Tejas and Jayhawk were canceled successors to Prescott. They were supposed to be 40-50 stages and 7+GHz. Intel always takes a long time to learn their lessons.

babe wake up new End of Dennard Scaling just dropped

If you weren't around in the 90's you won't understand just how crazy it was. On average CPUs got 10% better IPC/year 50% higher clocks per year. Power went from about 3 watts to about 60 watts. CPUs went went from being bare ceramic packages without a heat sink to having a tiny 8000 RPM earbleedingly awful fan to having larger sinks with low speed fans. Graphics cards went from being a pure 2D affair without any acceleration, to including more and more GUI acceleration features, to rasterizing and texturing triangles to per pixel lighting and hardware T&L to having per pixel programmable shaders in the early 00's. Games had not settle on what they could be and settled into making basically a reskin of the same AAA action-adventure type game with different art assets and settings and the same basic gameplay. Developers were trying to one up each other with all kinds of crazy new ideas throghout the 90's. A lot of it was predictably awful; some of it was pure magic (like ultima underworld; that games is like finding rabbit fossils in precambrian rock; it just shouldn't exist and shouldn't be possible on a 386). Without a technology to replace silicon CMOS and being a new exponential leg of a technological S-curve there will never be anything like it again.

To underpin just how crazy the 90's was. If Dennard scaling had magically continued, somehow, we'd have 1.6 THz single core CPUs with 80 kW TDP. That's the exponential we were on for over a decade and 2002-2005 felt like crashing into a brick wall. In the 90's most people defined their hardware by the clock speed; it was nearly synonymous with performance. Before "netburst" only really cyrix was an outlier with terrible IPC. For marketing reasons it was obvious why intel did what they did. They had pulled that same rabbit out of the hat a dozen times before; if they could do it again and AMD did not they'd be years ahead. If they tried it and failed, at least they'd still have higher clocks and manage to sell some CPUs on outdated metrics.

went from 16 mhz to 2 ghz in a bit over 10 years, still a good effort

The Pentium4 was also an opening for Transmeta to show a different way. We were focused on lower power while still keeping up the IPC. We had developed a really clever clock tree architecture that allowed us to only clock parts of the chip that needed to be updated that cycle (clock enables as far as the eye could see). This meant our active power was really, really low.

We also did frequency/voltage scaling before anyone else as far as I am aware. This got our active power even lower. Playing with the substrate voltage was another hack we had to lower our leakage current.

You should do an episode on Transmeta.

Nearly everything I both marveled and shook my head at from the sidelines of the semi, computer, and IT industry for the last 20 years (and all that time buried in those HW and chip articles), you pretty much condensed in 15 mins. Brings words to thought. Still excited and blind about what's around the corner, what's coming, and which player is going to turn over next...

2:42 LOL, how many stopped the video to rewatch this?

The idea of dark silicon was prevalent in the spacecraft electronics industry in the early ‘80s when I used it. Much cruder though. Here the issue was using TTL logic (all that was available for radiation hardened work) for complex functions. We would cycle power to individual chips to reduce the power demands on a very limited supply.

Asianometry: uploads a video about a thing I've never even heard of
me: oh yeah popcorn time

You are a video making machine!   So, so good.

Dude.... fascinating. This is everything i wanted to know about CPUs as a kid (~90s), but didn't have the resources to investigate 🙏

Evolution in nature also followed this curve. Nerves started slow, but sped up using electrochemical reactions. It was a dead end. Nature didn't give up on speeding up neurons as much as discovered the advantages of parallelism. Your brain is a relatively slow communicating, but massively parallel machine.

Great, and it's good that Dennard receives the credit that he deserves as he never mentioned in the press due to his obsession with "Moore's law" due to Intel's marketing machine.

9:10 - “AMD’s dual core… in 2004”… “Intel’s Pentium D in 2005”

Sun Microsystems dual core UltraSPARC IV was released in 2004… a massive jump was made by Sun Microsystems octal core UltraSPARC T1 in 2005

16 & 32 core processors were later used by Sun Microsystems & then by Oracle Corporation… while handling 4 instructions per cycle & speeding to 5 GHz on the SPARC T8.

SPARC by TSMC pushed the market to incredible places, by leading often years ahead of their time.

Wish I had my 53Ghz CPU...but another problem alongside physical dimensions downscaling was the way we handle code to make it run fast, ie pipelined with a lot of pre-emptive/speculative execution.

What Intel found out the hard way during the peak pentium high frequency era before they gave up and went core2duo was, the longer your pipeline gets to take advantage of this high frequency, the more branch miss and cache miss and pipeline flushes you end up having to deal with, in many workload types. So you reach a wall where it doesn't scale anymore anyway.

The core2duo architecture pipeline that replaced the last pentium types was almost twice shorter and still outperformed it in virtually all payloads at much lower frequency.

Prescott, also known as Preshot, was AMD's big opening. They'd realized that pushing for ever higher clockspeeds was a fool errands, and designed a much smarter pipeline that could execute many more instructions per clock cycle. It was the Athlon XP and it should have dominated the world. Why it didn't is a story best told by Jim from Adored TV.

These kind of difficulties always stimulate new inventions.
I'm pretty sure if we had these 50GHz chips the systems wouldn't perform 10x faster, also because much less effort put in software optimization, and less hardware acceleration that CPUs / GPUs are stuffed with today.
Parallel computing development was an obvious thing anyway, as it reflects the way heavy multi-tasking systems work.

Writing parallel software is challenging.    It has also taken a long time for the tools to catch up with the need to support it well.