Around Pentium 4 and Centrino, so somewhere around 2002 - 2003 ish.
The initial projection was that Intel could scale their transistor down indefinitely, we could somehow cool Pentium 4 effectively, and management think clock speed sells, so some day they could scale to 10Ghz CPU.
That was when they hit the TDP ceiling. Internally named as Thermal Wall by Intel CTO Patrick Gelsinger. Before Pentium 4 Intel saw the rise of Laptop computer where energy efficiency was the key. And Pentium-M was a side project from (cough) Patrick Gelsinger. Which ultimately saved Intel's Pentium 4 fiasco.
The market might have unlimited Dollar for performance. But it is still limited by TDP.
With work from home/covid lockdown I am more and more interested in going back to a desktop computer (vs macbook pro). In a desktop performance per watt effectively doesn't matter. Similarly with the chromebook as a portal to servers/cloud resources too (eg run your IDE in a cloud instance or something) ...
I wonder if performance per dollar will ever come back ?
>In a desktop performance per watt effectively doesn't matter.
Unfortunately it does. Just different sort of ways. If you want 64 Core, And you have max ~250W TDP CPU on a computer ( Assuming no fancy cooling ). You are effectively limited to less than 4W per core. Even less if you exclude memory controllers and Interconnect. You could argue you want 32 Core or even 16 Core, but scaling the up the clock speed curve beyond optimal level will means power increase exponentially. i.e You are still hitting the same wall.
And I should note, with anything per dollar, the question isn't really technical per se, but function of market. AMD is pretty good at performance per dollar right now, and will be more so once they announce Zen 3.
Some day if I could be bothered I should write a blog post on it.
The initial projection was that Intel could scale their transistor down indefinitely, we could somehow cool Pentium 4 effectively, and management think clock speed sells, so some day they could scale to 10Ghz CPU.
That was when they hit the TDP ceiling. Internally named as Thermal Wall by Intel CTO Patrick Gelsinger. Before Pentium 4 Intel saw the rise of Laptop computer where energy efficiency was the key. And Pentium-M was a side project from (cough) Patrick Gelsinger. Which ultimately saved Intel's Pentium 4 fiasco.
The market might have unlimited Dollar for performance. But it is still limited by TDP.