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Intrinsity Claims 2.2 Ghz Chip
PowerMacDaddy writes "Over at SiliconValley.com there's an article about an Ausin, TX startup named Intrinsity that has unveiled a new chip that utilizes a new logic process with conventional fab processes to acheive a 2.2GHz clock rate. The company is headed by former Texas Instruments and Apple Computer microprocessor developer Paul Nixon. The real question is, is this all FUD, will the real-world performance be part of The Megahertz Myth, or is this thing for real?"
Just take a normal processor and put an inverter ring off to the side, running at 100mhz, and connected to nothing but power and ground.
Back in the 60s, the power of a radio was measured by the number of transistors. That is, until one radio company put hundreds of useless transistors on their board and didn't even wire them up. After that, radios started getting measured on real abilities like quality of sound. Maybe computer marketting will catch up some day, marketting meaningful numbers: minimum FPS in Quake 3!
-Ted
The real question is, is this all FUD, will the real-world performance be part of The Megahertz Myth, or is this thing for real?"
It doesn't matter if it is real or vapour, it will still fall prey to the "Megahertz Myth". Maybe someday, people will understand: non-similar architectures can't be compared by MHz alone. And even most similar arch's can't be compared via MHz, as the Intel v. AMD war will tell you.
It is even worse than that! no single metric will ever give you the whole story.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
In a nutshell this is saying "Someone said something, but it might be bogus, and the cycle speed really doesn't mean much anyways.". Alrighty then. This is like a "nothing to see here, move along!" type articles.
What is dynamic logic? How is it different from conventional logic wired together with different types of gates?
Both dynamic and static logic use logic gates or blocks that are wired together. The difference is in how the gates are implemented internally, and how they pass data back and forth.
CMOS is a good example of static logic. It uses pull-up and pull-down transistor networks to make sure that outputs are always strongly asserted. This makes CMOS gates big and makes input capacitance larger than it otherwise needs to be. But, it's well-understood, has a few attractive features, and has a whole slew of design tools built for it.
Precharge logic is a good example of dynamic logic. It uses the parasitic capacitance of the output line to store the output value. The output node is charged up on one half of the clock (precharge phase), and left floating on the other half (readout phase). During the readout phase, the inputs are asserted. Inputs are fed into a pull-down transistor network that drives the output low if it should be low, and leaves it alone if it should be high. This style of logic takes up half the space of CMOS logic, has half the input capacitance, and has stronger driving capability (NFETs pulling down typically drive 2x-3x more strongly than PFETs pulling up). This means that if you play your cards right, you can make precharge logic circuits that are faster *and* more compact than CMOS logic circuits. The downsides are that designing and verifying precharge logic is a royal pain, and that you have to have a clock input into the logic block.
The article describes a more complicated dynamic logic scheme with a four-phase clock. These kinds of schemes have been floating around in research literature for years, but are usually not used because of the greater complexity and fewer tools available.
... for a while in the late '99-early '00 region as a PFY sysadmin. If they say they can do something, I'd lay good money on them doing it. The level of expertise and knowledge displayed by their staff was stunning. More specifically, I do recall some of the engineers talking excitedly about this stuff at the time and mentioning breaking the 2GHz barrier (keep in mind this was in late '99), so this is hardly a publicity stunt as it's been in the works for quite a while if it's the same thing I was hearing about then...
They were the Austin branch of a company called Exponential Tech. Doing a google on that should bring you up to speed on the Apple connection. I wouldn't really consider them a startup as they've been around for several years and have designed a number of very popular things (e.g. DSPs for other chip manufacturers).
They were a great bunch to work for, especially for being kind to a rather wet-behind-the-ears sysadmin like I was. The only downside to working there was the gawd-awful commute I had to do from far NE Austin to far SW Austin. (If you're an EE type who'd like to live in Austin, they'd IMHO be a great place to work for)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
> Why don't they benchmark the mac with anything
... all of your processing is done in realtime. The Mac runs music and audio apps faster, too. I get incredible performance in Cubase 5.0 on a PowerMac G4/733. You can fill up all of Cubase's plug-in slots and still have CPU power left over (there's a CPU meter built-into Cubase ... that's how CPU intensive it is). Latency is also better on the Mac, and that's very important in audio.
... the Mac is the best-performing machine for all of these. These are the tasks that Macs are BUILT FOR. It just so happens that everybody wants to do these things now, thanks to digital camcorders, cameras, MP3's and security. Doesn't magically make Intel machines any better than they are, no matter what the clock speed of the CPU.
> other than PS, ever, ever, ever, ever?
They also benchmark with Media Cleaner Pro, which is a very widely-used media encoding application. At this past Macworld Expo NY, a Mac with a G4/867 in it took a Spiderman movie trailer from tape to Web, and then played the result, well before the similar Intel machine (1.7GHz P4) could even finish encoding the clip. Same task, same media, same application, same RAM, same hard disk, same graphics adapter. Only thing that's different is Mac OS / Windows, G4 / P4 and the mobo. The machines even end up being equivalently-priced (I think they use Compaq workstations for these tests).
> How could anyone question the validity of an
> application that has always been primarily a mac
> application?
Photoshop has been running on both Mac and Windows platforms for years and years now. It is optimized for Intel with the assistance of Intel engineers. It is optimized for the Mac by Adobe engineers all on their own.
I work in music and audio, and it is very performance intensive
Video, music and audio, graphics, encoding and encryption