Question What's stopping us?

[PrabhakaranKaruppaih]

Once there were components which are very Large and Heavy...(Like Hardisks and other components) Now there are so many are put inside a tiny block. But why only a few processors can be put inside a block now. Why not thousands of it inside? What's stopping us?

 

[BFG-9000]

Why not thousands of it inside? What's stopping us?

Your imagination, or wallet. At a time when anyone can buy a card with 16,384 cores on it and slap it into their desktop PC, what's stopping you?

Of course, more cores only help with massively parallelizable workloads. That why most prefer fewer CPU cores clocked faster.

 

[TerryLaze]

Of course, more cores only help with massively parallelizable workloads. That why most prefer fewer CPU cores clocked faster.

Yup, mostly this, you can have many CPU cores in a single CPU if you have enough money but it's not going to help you for gaming.
You would still need a certain amount of high clock cores which is basically what we got with intel's hybrid approach. You get your normal high end fast CPU and you also get a whole bunch of small cores to help with whatever needs many cores.
Kinda also with ryzen but there you have to shut off one CCX to get the benefit, or manually restrict your game to a single CCX.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBxtS9BpVWs

 

[rgd1101]

Once there were components which are very Large and Heavy...(Like Hardisks and other components) Now there are so many are put inside a tiny block. But why only a few processors can be put inside a block now. Why not thousands of it inside? What's stopping us?

physics

 

[USAFRet]

Once there were components which are very Large and Heavy...(Like Hardisks and other components) Now there are so many are put inside a tiny block. But why only a few processors can be put inside a block now. Why not thousands of it inside? What's stopping us?

Physics, research, knowledge, money.

This is why we didn't go directly from a Sopwith Camel to the F-22 Raptor.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Once there were components which are very Large and Heavy...(Like Hardisks and other components) Now there are so many are put inside a tiny block. But why only a few processors can be put inside a block now. Why not thousands of it inside? What's stopping us?

Depending on your definition of a "processor", GPUs are already there. The RTX 4090 for example has 16,384 processing units. The problem is, GPUs are only good for well structured programs, something that a typical user program is not and cannot be for various reasons.

This is also in addition to us wanting more and more functionality out of general purpose processors. We could probably fit 1000s of general purpose processors into a single unit... if we were willing to use an 8-bit or early 16-bit CPU core from the 80s.