Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died | Hacker News Reader

Robert Dennard, DRAM Pioneer, has died

spectrum.ieee.org

349 pointsjnord29 comments

This is the Dennard of Dennard Scaling, a chip scaling law that is arguably as important as Moore's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture was a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to, why the Cell processor never hit the 5Ghz it was supposed to, why we've been spending quite a bit of the transistor budget on more cores rather than a very fancy single CPU core of 10Bs of transistors, and why chips with lower thermal limits will see a lot of "dead silicon" where you can't actually light up the whole chip at once without melting it.

Dennard scaling, for people in the industry, was far more important than Moore's law when it was available.

Moore made a high-level observation, but Dennard told you how to do it.

Well, it's basically the technical implementation of Moore's law, since Moore's law is just an empirical observation. (And maybe also a self-fulfilling prophecy)

>The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture was a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to, why the Cell processor never hit the 5Ghz it was supposed to

Around that time the PowerPC 970 aka G5 also failed to achieve 3 GHz, breaking the promise Steve Jobs publicly made at one of his keynotes for Apple.

Now there will be a twinge of sadness whenever I read a paper beginning with “Since the end of Dennard scaling…”.

"The end of Dennard scaling and the impending repeal of Moore's law" is very overused in very many papers. :)

> The end of Dennard scaling was why the Pentium 4 architecture was a dead end and never hit 10Ghz like it was supposed to

I've always been puzzled by this. Did Intel really not see this coming? I remember talking to Intel engineers way back when they were promising 10GHz in the near future - I think the codename at the time was Tejas. They seemed very confident. The architecture must have already been planned out - and yet it seems from the outside like the end of Dennard scaling was a total surprise to them?

Intel (and almost everyone else tbh) didn’t fully appreciate how Denard scaling would play out at smaller nodes. They expected to keep lowering the transistor threshold voltage alongside transistor size but that became increasingly difficult due to leakage currents.

They also played with tricks like strained silicon on 90nm and high-k metal gate in 45 nm in order to boost performance and lower leakage respectively.

It was a scaling law that had worked for three decades, and didn't show any signs of faltering. Even the most senior of the people building those designs had spent their entire careers in a world where it just was true.

And then it went away in an instant.

But when Dennard Scaling was in full swing, it was glorious. It only took six years to go from the original Pentium 60Hz on March 22, 1993 to Pentium III 600 MHz on August 2, 1999 and just a year later you could buy a 1GHz one.

Apparently he died 5 months ago, but seems to not have gotten a lot of notice on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40276464

Mainstream outlets did write obits at the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/technology/robert-dennard...

RIP.

I was surprised that it didn't get much attention on HN when the news broke back in April, considering Dennard's large contributions to technology.

> 91

I really hope I live as long as these guys. It's one thing to invent something useful, it's another to spend your life watching it grow.

Roger Penrose is 93 and as sharp as a tack!

Another: Ed Thorpe is similarly old and still going strong, last time I saw.

Built different.

wasnt there a 98 year old who got their second nobel?

Maybe its just me but here are people who made the world around us possible, and yet theu go unnoticed, in shadows, we seriously should celebrate and discuss scientists and technologists more, there are so many out there as important as Einstein, Lorenz Feynman and yet no where to be found in todays culture...

Bob Dennard enjoyed Scottish country dancing, which is how I knew him. He was a kind and humble man. R.I.P.

DRAM pioneers don't die, they just stop their refresh cycle.

Previous discussion from 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40276464

He passed away months ago. RIP. He seems like a class act from what I’ve heard.

May his memory live on

Wonder if he had some choice words about ECC.

Not to be confused with Bob Denard[1] with 1 “n”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Denard

RIP.

(April)

"By the early 1970s, DRAM was standard in virtually all computers."

Perfect bullshit.

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