CPUs Could Use 85 Percent Fewer Transistors With New Adaptive Tech

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Reduces the number of transistors required by a staggering 85%.

A team of researchers with the Vienna University of Technology have evolved computing's most fundamental unit: the transistor. Tapping into the element Germanium (Ge), they've developed a new, adaptive transistor design that can change its configuration on the fly, according to the workload requirements. The potential of it, you ask? Enormous, as it could enable using up to 85% fewer transistors than current approaches. Furthermore, with fewer transistors operating for the same work, power consumption and temperatures are reduced, which in turn allows for higher frequency scaling and performance.

Transistors - and especially Field Effect Transistors (FETs) - are the fundamental units of semiconductor design: three elements working in unison that unlock our technological experiences. Much like floodgates control whether water flows or not, transistors control whether the current makes its journey from the source (the first element) towards the drain (the second element). However, the transistor by itself isn't very smart; in fact, it would be rendered pretty much useless were it not for the inputs of its control electrode. Extending the water analogy, a dam is extremely useful only if you can control whether the water flows through it or not. Thus we need a third fundamental element - the transistor's gate. This three-part simplicity of transistors is what allows us to have billions of them crammed into the latest high-performance chips.

The simplicity of the transistor does have a caveat: functionality. While transistors can assume many different functions, these functions are, in themselves, simple. It's from the addition of many small, simple transistors together (in integrated circuits) that higher-order performance and more complex workloads can be unlocked. A certain number of transistors, arranged in a certain way, can be turned into a Zen 3 core; they can also turn into an Nvidia CUDA core or additional blocks of memory caches.

Remember Intel's tick-tock (and later tock-tock-tock) strategy? In those terms, a tock (microarchitecture change) essentially corresponds to the performance improvements that can be unlocked by rearranging and redesigning transistor blocks. A tick (a change in manufacturing node) increases the amount of transistors available for engineers to use in ever increasingly-complex circuits. The death of Intel's tick-tock strategy showcases how transistor density advancements are becoming more difficult to achieve. And while materials and design research have devised many ways to improve transistors, their fundamental design remains unchanged. And where there's a lack of change, there's an opportunity: what benefits could come from redesigning the transistor?
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