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The preliminary program
for the annual Hot Chips conference says a lot about the state of the
microprocessor industry both for what's on it, and for what's not.
All the top server CPU vendors--Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, Intel,
Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems--will present on their latest or
next-generation chips. Competition is expected to be intense between
Intel's Nehalem EX, AMD's Magny Cours, IBM's Power7 and Sun's Rainbow
Falls.
However, Sun did not submit a paper on Rock, its high-end server CPU first described in February 2008, leading to speculation the company may have canceled the chip. Sun lost Rock's chief architect, Marc Tremblay, to Microsoft earlier this year and the merger with Oracle cast uncertainty over Sun's future Sparc efforts.
Rock provided hardware support for two advances in parallel
processing, transactional memory that would eliminate today's
inefficient data locking techniques and scout threads that could
pre-fetch data to cache in anticipation of program branches. "The signs
are not looking good, so we may be writing an epitaph for Rock soon,"
said Nathan Brookwood, principal of market watcher Insight64 (Saratoga,
Calif.).
Fujitsu may help Sun fill a hole if it cancel's Rock. The
company will describe an eight-core Sparc processor at Hot Chips, and
Fujitsu and Sun have a long established relationship of selling each
other's systems.
Also missing from the Hot Chips program is Intel's Tukwilla,
the first Itanium CPU to use Intel's Quick Path Interconnect and an
on-board memory controller. Intel deferred the Tukwilla launch from
this fall to early next year.
"My reading on that was they probably found some places where
it was not scaling as good as they thought it should," said Brookwood.
Nvidia founder and chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang will give a
visionary keynote at Hot Chips. However there are no graphics processor
papers on the program.
The next-generation graphics chips are expected to launch
following the release this fall of Microsoft's Windows 7 and its
DirectX 11.0 application programming interface. It supports a new
DirectX Compute ability to manage multiple cores on graphics and host
processors, handling similar jobs as the OpenCL software supported by
Apple and Nvidia's CUDA parallel programming environment.
Classic rivals, software in spotlight
Software for parallel programming multicore processors is a significant
focus for Hot Chips this year. For example, the conference will host a
half-day tutorial on OpenCL with speakers from AMD, Apple, Nokia and
Nvidia.
In a departure from chip-oriented papers, organizers also have planned a session where leading research labs
will report on their efforts to define parallel programming models for
tomorrow's multicore chips. The lack of parallel programming tools for
future many-core architectures is seen as the most pressing problem in
computer science today.
The conference will also play host to classic rivalries in chip
architecture. Intel will present details of its Nehalem EX, a
dual-threaded eight-core version of its Xeon 5500 with enhanced memory
bandwidth suitable for four-socket systems. Archrival AMD will counter
with a paper on Magny Cours, a single-threaded 12-core part supporting
four memory controllers.
I think Nehalem EX is likely to be a higher performing chip
than the Magny Cours," said Brookwood, but the competition between the
two "may be close," he added.
For its part, IBM will present two papers on Power7, a follow
on to its 65nm dual-core Power6 chip that has been shipping since 2007.
IBM has confirmed Power7 will sport 8 cores. It is expected to be made
in a 45nm process and ship in systems next year.
Among other processors at Hot Chips, Sun will describe Rainbow
Falls, a third generation of its aggressively multi-threaded Niagara
architecture aimed at Web servers.
Intel and Texas Instruments will face off in mobile processors. Intel
will describe Moorestown, its next-generation mobile platform including
the Atom CPU and a core logic chip. TI will describe the OMAP 4430, its
next-generation applications processor.
FPGA rivals Xilinx and Altera will also detail their
next-generation parts. Xilinx will discuss the Virtex6 and Altera will
present on its Stratix IV GT.
Read the original article: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218000214
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