Intel to Redefine Performance at IDF
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Intel co-founder Gordon Moore&#39;s famous law will be re-examined again next week, as Intel shifts away from pure speed to the more efficient utilization of silicon.
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(InfoWorld) - Following their march from standard processors to dual-core and quad-core designs in 2006, Intel researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs more than a teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) while using less electricity than a modern desktop PC chip. First described by Intel executivesÂ at a September trade show, the chip fits 80 cores onto a 275-square millimeter, fingernail-size chip and draws only 62 watts of power -- less than many modern desktop chips. The company has no plans to bring this "teraflops research chip" to market, but is using it to test new technologies such as high-bandwidth interconnects, energy management techniques, and a tile design method to build multicore chips, said Jerry Bautista, director of Intel's tera-scale research program. He spoke in a conference call with reporters on Friday before presenting technical details of the research at the ISSCC (Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference) trade show in San Francisco. Intel engineers are also using the chip to explore new forms of tera-scale computing, in which future users could process terabytes of data on their desktops to perform real-time speech recognition, multimedia data mining, photo-realistic gaming and artificial intelligence. Until now, that degree of computing performance has been available only to scientists and academics using machines like ASCI Red, the teraflops supercomputer built by Intel and its partners in 1996 for U.S. government researchers at Sandia National Labs, near Albuquerque, New Mexico. That system handled a comparable amount of computing as the new chip, but demanded an enormous 500 kilowatts of power and 500 kilowatts of cooling to run its nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro chips. Shrunk onto a single chip, that power would allow average consumers to use their PCs in new ways. They could use improved search functions on the vast amounts of digital media stored on home desktops, searching large photo archives for specific attributes such as all the shots where a certain person is smiling, or where that person is posing with a friend, Bautista said. Running at 3.16GHz, the new chip achieves 1.01 teraflops of computation -- an efficiency of 16 gigaflops per watt. It can run even faster, but loses efficiency at higher speeds, performing at 1.63 teraflops at 5.1 GHz and 1.81 teraflops at 5.7 GHz. The processor saves power by shunting idle cores into sleep mode, then instantly turning them on as they're needed. Each modular tile has its own router built alongside the core, creating a "network on a chip." Despite using such an efficient grid, the researchers found they could actually hurt performance by adding too many cores. Performance scaled up directly from two cores to four, eight and 16. But they found that computing performance began to drop with 32 and 64 cores. "If we simply added more than 16 cores, we would get diminishing returns, because the threads and data traffic would not be used properly, so the cores get in the way of each other. It's like having too many cooks in the kitchen," said Bautista. To solve the problem on the new chip, they used a hardware-based thread scheduler and faster on-chip memory caches, optimizing the way data flows from memory into each core. To improve the design, Intel researchers plan to add a layer of "3D stacked memory" under the chip to minimize the time and power required to feed the cores with data. Next, they will create a mega-chip that uses general purpose cores instead of the floating-point units used in the current design.
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Intel announced its plans on Thursday to improve the Internet by making it safer, more useful, reliable, and accessible. At Fall IDF (Intel Developer Forum), Pat Gelsinger, Senior Vice President and Chief
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The chip maker finishes design work on Penryn, a chip that could be crucial in helping Intel to maintain a new-found performance lead
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The new NAND chip design will increase throughput up to 5X
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Intel Corp.'s decision to begin shipping versions of x86 processors that are capable of 64-bit computing has slowed down the adoption of the company's high-end Itanium processors, a senior executive acknowledged Tuesday during a question and answer session at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco.
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Powerful computer processor will be modified for mobile devices.
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Chipmaker to focus on technology and features instead of megahertz.
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CSI Mountain View Intel's plan to unveil its copy of AMD's Hypertransport technology at next month's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) has been spoiled by a rather thorough analyst.â¦
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SAN FRANCISCO - Intel Corp.'s dual-core strategy for mobile processors became a little clearer this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, but questions remain about the company's plans for bringing dual-core designs to its desktop and low-end server chips.
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(InfoWorld) - After a busy two yearsÂ reorganizing LSI, the new leadership of the company, which includes several former Intel executives, is ready to do battle in the competitive markets for storage and networking chips. LSI is one of the first major companies to finish reorganizing amid a broad consolidation in the chip sector caused by rising research and development costs. The rising costs means that size matters: Companies need to make enough money to keep up with higher costs for chip designs and upgrades. Development budgets are rising as the size of transistors and other parts on a chip shrink, said Jeff Richardson, executive vice president of the Network and Storage Products Group at LSI. The size of components on chips, and the spaces between them, has already hit 45-nanometers, a microscopic size thousands of times thinner than a human hair. Without the budgets to continue investing in the machines and research needed to continue the development of chip products, companies will wither. One of the reasonsÂ LSI acquired Agere SystemsÂ late last year is because the networking and storage chips made by the two companies are a much larger, more viable business combined than separate, said Richardson. LSI is already ready to move forward, which is saying a lot since it has continued to buy or sell companies and divisions for the past several months. The last major deal was theÂ sale of its mobile phone products business to Infineon TechnologiesÂ last month for $450 million, a deal that will likely give Infineon the size to compete for third place in the mobile handset chip industry. LSI sold off its consumer products division in July, signed contract manufacturing agreements to allow it to slough off factories and workers, and has bought two chip makers over the past year, including StoreAge Networking Technologies. So far, the company has pared its workforce by over a third to 6,000 people. "We're done with the major moves," said Richardson. He joined LSI two years ago with several colleagues from Intel, including Abhi Talwalkar, LSI's president and chief executive officer. Talwalkar used to be a vice president and co-general manager at Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, which includes storage and communications products. The group set changes in motion at LSI to make it more streamlined in terms of its product portfolio, and more powerful in its main business segments -- networking and storage. "The combination of the companies has already resulted in major design wins," according to Richardson, though he declined to elaborate. LSI and Agere shared a lot of synergies in storage and networks, which is why the deal made sense, he said. In networking, LSI is now focused on providing chips to telecommunications companies for TV services, broadband, and collaboration. Chips are needed for equipment used in advanced packet processing, advanced traffic management, content inspection, and digital signal processing. For the storage business, which includes hard disc drives, there are a host of new products either coming out or under consideration at the company, including chips for solid-state drives, Richardson said. The decision to sell its mobile phone arm wasn't easy, but LSI sees the market as a tough one undergoing consolidation. Two companies dominate in communications chips, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, said Richardson, and there's an ongoing battle for a distant third place. Several major chip makers have opted out of the segment in recent years. For example,Â Intel agreed to sellÂ its communications and application processor business last year to Marvell Technology Group for $600 million. This year has seen a few deals, including the LSI-Infineon transaction and the purchase of Analog Devices' telecommunications chip products by Taiwan's MediaTek for $350 million in cash. "We believe there will be further consolidation," said Richardson. Â
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At a meeting of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in Santa Clara later this afternoon, engineers from Intel are slated to demonstrate a working version of a conceptual CPU. As promised during the last Intel Developers' Forum, this concept CPU will incorporate 80 cores using an experimental "network-on-a-chip" architecture.
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Chip maker Intel Corp. has announced plans to improve its flagship products in ways that could redefine the role of a microprocessor in a computer and help the company stay ahead of its competitors.
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Chip maker plans for smaller, faster, less power-hungry processors.
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SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA -- Intel is drawing the curtain on some of its future research projects to continue making transistors smaller, faster, and less power-hungry out as far as 2020.
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(InfoWorld) - Advanced Micro Devices added a triple-core desktop processor to its product road map on Monday, looking to upstage rival Intel ahead of itsÂ Intel Developer ForumÂ (IDF) conference in San Francisco this week. The triple-core Phenom processor is slated for release during the first quarter of 2008, following the release of the firstÂ quad-core Phenom chipsÂ in December. Like the quad-core version of the Phenom, the triple-core version of the chip uses a single silicon chip instead of a multichip package that combines two chips, such as Intel employs for its quad-core chips. AMD's announcement appeared in time to upstage IDF, which starts Tuesday. Intel will offer detailed updates on its processor road map at IDF, including more information on the release of itsÂ Penryn family of processors, slated to hit the market starting in November, and will likely discuss upcoming products, such as the Nehalem family of chips due to be released in 2008. Intel has extended its lead in the processor market over AMD in recent quarters, after stumbling in 2006. But AMD is hoping to draw closer, counting on its recently releasedÂ quad-core Opteron processorÂ and upcoming Phenom chips to reinvigorate its product lineup. The triple-core version of Phenom aims to reach a "broader audience" of PC users than the quad-core chips, AMD said. The company did not reveal the expected clock speeds of the triple-core chips, or say how much they will cost when released.
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Intel announced yesterday that it had mastered a new design that makes computing more powerful, less expensive and so much more efficient that mobile devices like cellphones may soon accomplish tasks reserved until recently for desktop computers and other equipment with larger processors.