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Exactly one year ago we came out with a ground-breaking announcement: Sun
Microsystems Introduces Breakthrough UltraSPARC T1 Processor with
CoolThreads Technology, Setting a New Industry Standard for
Performance, Innovation.
Exactly one year ago we came out with a ground-breaking announcement: Sun
Microsystems Introduces Breakthrough UltraSPARC T1 Processor with
CoolThreads Technology, Setting a New Industry Standard for
Performance, Innovation.
I want this blog to be
understood as a glossary. I discovered a blog being a prefect place to
collect and share information. Inspired through Dan Berg's technology session in Prague I surfed the web to better understand key words of microprocessor technology. During my time with Advanced Micro Devices
I developed some passion around this and since did not get back to some
more detailed understanding of where the technology in this area was
heading. I hope to have put everything in the right context as you
may know, I am not a techie just working in Human Resources!
Let's start with citing a paragraph out of a whitepaper found on Sun's page for Throughput Computing:
....the
disparity between processor speeds and memory access speeds means that
memory latency dominates application performance, erasing even very
impressive gains in clock rates. While processor speeds continue to
double every two years, memory speeds have typically doubled only every
six years. This growing disconnect is the result of memory suppliers
focusing on density and cost as their design center, rather than speed.
Unfortunately, this relative gap between processor and memory speeds
leaves ultra-fast processors idle as much as 85 percent of the time, waiting for memory
to return required data. Ironically, as traditional processor execution
pipelines get faster and more complex, the effect of memory latency
growsfast, expensive processors spend more cycles doing nothing. Worse
still, idle processors continue to draw power and generate heat. Its
easy to see that frequency (gigahertz) is truly a misleading indicator
of real performance.
This is the problem statement, now how did Sun get it's processors achieve more throughput, say work faster and consume less power? Sounds so simple: by Chip Multithreading (CMT):
Unlike
complex single-threaded processors, CMT processors utilize the
available transistor budget to implement multiple hardware
multithreading processor cores on a single silicon wafer or chip.
Because these individual processor cores implement much simpler
pipelines (emphasizing thread-level parallelism or TLP over instruction level parallelism or ILP),
they are also substantially cooler and require significantly less
electrical energy to operate. This innovative approach results in
CoolThreads processor technologymultiple physical instruction
execution pipelines (one for each core), with several active thread
contexts per pipeline or core.
Sun's T1 processor code named Niagara possesses 8 cores or in other words 8 different microprocessors on a single chip or die produced with advanced production technology using 90 nanometer structures (this year it has come down as far as 65 nanometers). Each core is able to process 4 threads in parallel, therefor we talk about 32 systems on one chip.
It
is not for nothing that we are on top of the industry with our current
systems and more to come! When I look at our innovations I really feel
good about the future of Sun. As an example, Robert Drost's invention of Proximity I/O or also known under the term Proximity Communications.
Simply speaking if you put two microprocessors backside up close to one
another, they communicate via wireless signals, with result of higher
speeds and less energy consumption. Really great to have so many bright
guys on board!
And what is additionally cool: we opensource even our processor architectures (not only our software!) on openSparc. This makes it easy for other companies to build software and hardware around our systems!
Read the original article: http://blogs.sun.com/vsehr/entry/microprocessor_innovation_-_announcement_anniversary |
