NVIDIA Interview Question
AnalystsTeam: power
Country: United States
Interview Type: In-Person
leakier transistors implies higher performance
the 1GHz design with 2 operations is better performance wise. the cost trade-off would be high performance leaky transistors due to a tighter timing margin. if power consumption is a concern, the 500MHz processor with slower but less leaky transistors may be an option provided the additional static power due to twice the number of compute operations isn't greater than the power trade-in from less leakier transistors.
Leakage power is independent of operating frequency. So we should choose the design with lower number of transistors. Since the 500MHz design has 4 op in parallel, it will need more transistors. So it is better to choose 1GHz design considering only leakage.
- Psshysh November 05, 2014But 1GHz design will have more dynamic power dissipation, so the choice depends on the distribution of the 3 type of transistors.