Aug 14, 2026, 10:18 AMI don't understand the point that you're trying to make. The fact that transistors can't be made smaller than an atom was known at the time, but it was predicted that they could be made smaller at a specific rate. That prediction was met. The size of transistors throughout the P4's lifetime shrank almost exactly as expected. That was not the problem. As I explained in the original post in this thread.
@david_chisnall the point I'm making is that you are comparing apples to oranges but I give up otherwise.
Aug 14, 2026, 11:13 AMBoth were assuming that something would keep scaling as it had previously. In the case of the P4, it was assuming that Dennard Scaling would continue and power consumption wouldn't be a factor when running at higher clock speeds. In the case of LLMs, it's assuming that adding more parameters increases utility. Both were based on extrapolating from insufficient data points and both were shown to be incorrect as the technology evolved.
Wow, is this even a real conversation? Am I asleep right now? I can't tell and I just took mental damage from trying to read this. Wraptile just... have a snickers... or something.
@david_chisnall sure but these are clearly differently constrained scenarios so what's the value in this analogy? It's like saying "fishing will not scale because we'll run out of fish" and "prose won't scale because we'll run out of fictional ideas" - both are kinda true but the comparison doesn't really add anything.