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Silicon Advances

December 26, 2006

Intel Roadmap

First there was Core microarchitecture dual-core. Then quad-core, based on the Core microarchitecture.

Next up will be mainstream quad-core processors and low power consumption quad-core servers, starting in the first quarter of 2007.

Ask About Computers incorrectly predicted the name of the mainstream quad-core processor as Core 2 Quadro. Close but no cigar. Rather, the processor "will be called the Intel Core 2 Quad".

In the second half of 2007, chips are to appear based upon the new 45nm (nanometer) process manufacturing technology.

A shrink of processors based on the Core microarchitecture seems inevitable.

The sheer cost of fabrication plants is staggering. The 45nm fabs of Intel alone represent an investment of about 9 billion dollars.

In 2008, Intel shall attempt to better the Core microarchitecture with a new microarchitecture codenamed Nehalem, and in 2010 a new microarchitecture called Gesher is to supercede the previous microarchitecture.

By that time, we're getting down to 32nm.

What will happen when technology hits another wall, this one of transistor size? It has to happen some time.

At some point transistor size will not be able to shrink at the same rate of the past, in which case the doubling of the cores on a CPU shall have to slow down as well.

Maybe a new technology--such as one using light--shall supplement or replace silicon. Maybe microarchitectural innovations under a different architecture shall drive performance.

Energy Efficient Performance

We are currently at the beginning of the era of energy efficient performance, as opposed to just performance driven by increasing clock speeds.

Such a change represents "the most profound shift in decades".

Energy efficiency is not just a function of processor design--executing 4 instructions per clock as opposed to 3 (that sort of thing)--but starts at the level of the transistor, and only then works its way up to the level of the chip and beyond.

High Definition Video

Comparison of Various Display Resolutions

One can never have enough (processing) power. Still, we lack the killer app to take advantage of all those operations per second (OPS). Or do we?

Maybe the next killer app will be high definition (HD) video.

It has long been noted how H.264 HD encoding is in a class unto itself in terms of the amount of time it takes to encode a HD stream.

HD requires about 8 times the horsepower of SD (to encode).

Supercomputer on a Chip

Cray Supercomputer

Supercomputing has finally been reduced to a chip.

Instead of a System on a Chip (SOC) we now have a supercomputer on a chip.

It took about 10 years to go from a teraflop supercomputer to a superchip.

Source

Silicon Advances Usher in new era of energy efficient performance

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