Wall Street Journal: Intel Prototype Chip Raises Industry Bar

Intel Corp. has developed a prototype chip with the equivalent of 80 electronic brains, the latest sign of a major design shift sweeping the semiconductor industry.

The Santa Clara, Calif., company's new chip is a research project, not a product. Intel's engineers managed to pack number-crunching capability into a device the size of a fingernail that once required a roomful of computers.

An 80-Processor Tester Shows How Demand For Power Drives Firms

Intel Corp. has developed a prototype chip with the equivalent of 80 electronic brains, the latest sign of a major design shift sweeping the semiconductor industry.

The Santa Clara, Calif., company's new chip is a research project, not a product. Intel's engineers managed to pack number-crunching capability into a device the size of a fingernail that once required a roomful of computers.

Other companies are exploiting the same concept, combining handfuls to hundreds of the microprocessors that serve as calculating engines in computers. Such creations now carry out specialized business and scientific chores and eventually may spread to consumer devices.

But some jobs, like identifying and processing images, are ideal for multibrained machines. Video-security systems might quickly scan and pick out a face in a crowd, for example, or a PC might automatically create video highlights of a single player in a football game, said Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer.

Mr. Rattner said cameras on future videogame systems could track users' motions -- eliminating the need for the kind of hand-held controller offered with Nintendo Co.'s Wii console. Realistic three-dimensional models of users could be transferred into videogames, or programs like a digital dance lesson.

"Then you could put the model for your partner in there," Mr. Rattner says. "If you step on their toes, it's not a big deal."

Such chips are often called "multicore," because they pack together core circuitry of a multiple microprocessors. The design has gained in popularity as an earlier tactic of boosting the operating frequency of each chip began consuming too much electrical power. Intel and rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. already offer dual-processor chips for PCs and laptops.

Sun Microsystems Inc., also of Santa Clara, is discussing improvements to a chip called UltraSparc T1, which has eight processors and uses a concept called "threading" to perform as many as 32 tasks at once. A version arriving next summer will perform as many as 64 tasks, said Marc Tremblay, a Sun senior vice president.

Intel, which is also describing its chip at the conference, created and hooked together 80 processors that were tailored for "floating-point" operations, a kind of calculation used by scientists. In tests, Mr. Rattner said, the chip exceeded a "teraflop" -- a trillion floating-point operations per second -- and it draws just 62 watts of power. By comparison, an Intel teraflop supercomputer in 1996 took up 2,000 square feet and drew 500,000 watts, he said.

Some companies differ about how the technology will evolve. Intel's Mr. Rattner in three to five years hopes to offer products that use simplified versions of the general-purpose x86 processors used in its PC chips.

But AMD and some other companies are proposing "heterogeneous" chips, which combine general-purpose microprocessors with specialized circuitry for tasks like image processing. "That is definitely a split in the industry," said Stephen Kleynhans, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

Azul Systems Inc., for example, sells systems with a 48-processor chip that is specially designed to run software based on Sun's Java technology. Stephen DeWitt, chief executive of the Silicon Valley start-up, is skeptical that general-purpose circuitry will ever match its performance for such tasks. "For special workloads, you need a special piece of silicon," said Marty Seyer, an AMD senior vice president.

Mr. Rattner thinks special-purpose circuitries will only play a small role, because they will be even harder to program than those with many general-purpose processors. His company and others are working on programming tools, as well as circuitry to help the electronic brains communicate with others and retrieve data from memory chips.

Read the original article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117122433831605099-email.html