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Intel Corp. will debut the world's biggest commercial
microprocessor as well as its lowest power X86 chip at the
International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco next
week. But a server chip from Sun Microsystems and a cellphone processor from Texas Instruments debuting at ISSCC will outflank Intel on both fronts.
Intel Corp. will debut the world's biggest commercial
microprocessor as well as its lowest power X86 chip at the
International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco next
week. But a server chip from Sun Microsystems and a cellphone processor from Texas Instruments debuting at ISSCC will outflank Intel on both fronts.
Intel will describe Silverthorne,
an x86 chip that consumes less than 2W, about one-fifth the power of
Intel's lowest power notebook chips. The company aims to use the CPU to enable a new generation of PC-compatible handheld devices.
Intel's Silverthorne is a 25mm-squared chip made in the company's latest 45nm process. It can issue two instructions per clock and run at rates up to 2 GHz with a front-side bus capable of 533 million transactions/second.
While Silverthorne makes significant strides ratcheting down the power
of an X86 core, it is still consumes much more power than high-end
cellphone chips and lacks any of their integrated communications
circuitry. Silverthorne is part of a broader group of five or more
chips, including Wi-Fi and ultimately WiMax silicon, Intel will gather
into designs for so-called ultramobile PCs and mobile Internet devices.
"The competition considers 2W laughable," said Will Strauss,
principal of market watcher Forward Concepts (Tempe, Ariz.). "600 mW is
the power budget for an entire cellphone processor and baseband," he
said.
In the same ISSCC session, TI will demonstrate a full blown
cellular chip that includes an 840 MHz ARM11 processor. It includes a
TI C55x DSP core running at 480 MHz as a communications baseband supporting the latest cellular transports including HSUPA and WCDMA.
TI did not disclose the size and power consumption of the chip in the
ISSCC abstract, however it is likely significantly smaller and lower
power than Silverthorne. The chip is the first 45nm cellular processor
TI has described, according to Strauss, and the first to crank an ARM11
processor to 840 MHz.
Qualcomm also aims to enable very powerful yet mobile systems
with its pending Snapdragon architecture, believed to be based on a
modified version of the ARM Cortex core. "All these companies are targeting the ultramobile device," said Strauss.
In computer servers, Intel will debut a four-core version of its Itanium
server CPU that packs a whopping 2.05 billion transistors, more
transistors than have ever been used in a commercial microprocessor,
according to the ISSCC organizers. Tukwilla measures in at nearly
700mm-squared and consumes an equally heavy 170W.
At the same ISSCC session, Sun will counter with the debut of Rock,
a significantly smaller (396mm-squared) server CPU that packs 16 cores
and is the first computer processor to support atomic transactions, an
emerging parallel-programming technique. Both Tukwilla and Rock are
built in 65nm technology.
Intel's Tukwilla runs at up to 2 GHz and packs 30 Mbytes cache.
It is the first CPU in the family to support Intel's new QuickPath
processor interconnect. QuickPath is a proprietary Intel CPU
interconnect aimed to compete with the HyperTransport interconnect from
archrival Advanced Micro Devices. It replaces Intel's aging front-side
bus.
In previous discussions,
Intel executives said Tukwilla is expected to double the performance of
Intel's existing 9000 series Itanium, a two-core chip code named
Montecito. Tukwilla uses a modified form of Intel's HyperThreading, an
implementation of simultaneous multi-threading in this case supporting
two threads per core.
The new competitor for both companies is Sun's Rock which will hit
speeds up to 2.3 GHz. It is the first commercial CPU that provides
hardware support for transactional memory. Also known as atomic
transactions, the feature has been discussed by researchers for years
as an effective way to execute
many transactions as a group in highly parallel programs while avoiding
the complexity of synchronization and locking mechanisms used today.
In an interview last year,
David Yen who heads Sun's semiconductor group said Rock will implement
a number of "modern processor features up to now only being discussed
in academic papers. The industry will get a new 'wow' beyond what we
have disclosed in our Niagara processors," he added.
An executive from Intel said last year that it appears Sun may try to link Rock CPUs using a new memory approach rather than using a direct processor-to-processor link.
Rock is aimed at create large systems to handle jobs such as database
processing. Such systems often gang dozens or even hundreds of CPUs in
a symmetric multiprocessing architecture. Intel hopes to use Tukwilla
in systems with as many as 128 CPUs.
Both Rick and Tukwilla support dual threading. In addition,
Sun's Rock also can generate as many as 32 helper threads to speed
execution.
Read the original article: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205920481
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