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Intel Looks to Billion-Transistor Processors
Weedstock writes: "EE Times has an article about Intel's next decade roadmap. It explains what are the current issues with the actual "plastic bumped organic land grid array" packaging technology and how it will be modified into a "bumpless package with built-up layers" to accomodate billion-transistor processors."
... but there was just a story up on refridgerators using magnets instead of compressors. I was about to post a comment and got some really weird errors. I looked at the main page and it was gone? Is there a conspiracy going on here? Since when did slashdot start yanking stories altogether, I mean I knew they'd sometimes edit stories or change links... but to erase something that was posted?
The magnetic fridge story was covered here earlier and was thus yanked out as a duplicate article.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Hopefully people will be putting all of this power to good use. I wonder if C programming will become as rare as assembler programming is today?
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1542 If the URL is bad. Go to www.anandtech.com, CPU on the right side, and look under recent articles for the BBUL story.
I was interested by the fact that the article indicates that chip speed is about to reach a bottleneck with the array package. Of course, as with all things, everything needs to be upgraded in step in order to reap the benefits.
The thing that i'm curious about is whether or not these changes in chip packaging will result in a disorganized series of changes in chip/board interface standards. socket 7, slot a, socket 370, etc.
Will the various companies(most notably intel and AMD) all be independently trying to solve the same problem in different ways? And will this mean that not only will we have rapid interface generations within the same company but that we will have to deal with even further incompatability between chips of competing companies?
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lysergically yours
I think the semiconductor industry should follow Gate's Law instead of Moore's Law. Try to catch up with Bill gates wealth, pack in as many transistors as he has cents in his bank.
How about if Intel develops a standard bus implementation that allows RAM to be fast enough to CATCH UP TO the fucking processors they already make?!?!
Now THERE'S an idea....
the next generation of the P4 ( >2 GHz) is supposed to have a 533 MHz bus with PC2700 DDR support. while not quite as fast as we would like, it is an improvement at least.
"Bumped to bumpless"?!? Whoopee f'n doo! They say that the wire widths will get smaller (no shit!), and lithography will get better (again, no shit!). Besides that, they don't really address how they will package a billion transistors (meaning chip interconnects). A fifty fold increase will mean at least a 10 fold increase in interconnects. But at least there are no bumps! ;-)
Oh, and a new "unidentified" gate oxide- yeah, and I have a new superconductor that is also unidentified.
Next, they talk about silicon-on-insulator (SOI) tech. Ah, IBM already is using this!
This "article" says zilch, and in some parts mentions year old tech as new stuff. By the way, Apple is looking to a trillion transistor processor with a warp drive and heisenburg compensators (this is a joke, for you clueless ones).
All in all, Michael needs to actually learn about technology before he starts posting garbage about supposed "new" tech.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
1THz processors are nice and all, but what about the necessary advancements in motherboard bus technology to match? I mean, you can have as fast a car you want, you get it to a track and flatten it's tires, it's not going to go very far. Personally, I would like to see a better partnership of chipset manufacturers and processor manufacturers to make sure that the rise of processor speeds is proportionate to the rise of chipset speeds.
Offtopic? Offtopic? Yes, by all means we must stick to the agenda gentlemen. The unwashed masses wait with baited breath for the appearance of the Beowulf cluster joke. I believe the secretary general of the U.N. is anxious to hear what everyone thinks about it, so for God's sake please stick to the topic.
Anyway, if I had mod points that would have gone "Funny".
Wow! This is pretty amazing. Just makes you wonder when traditional computing ( i.e. not quantum computing ) will reach its limits. I remember reading that this could occur around 2010, but then again that is barring new advances in physics.
Even then we do know that there are limits, for example there is a minimum limit to the amount of heat produced in a computation ( this is a result of the Second Law of Thermodynamics ). So there is a limit to the number of transistors that can be fit into any given area, otherwise the processor would be putting out too much heat energy.
Well anyway, this is very interesting and will make running simulations of real life scientific phenomena better, and as a result our understanding of the universe around us will be enhanced.
...interesting if true.
A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later you're talking about a really, really hot piece of silicon.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
last i knew, AMD = Advanced Micro Devices... where is the word "american" in that name?
Intel calls its bumpless package the BBUL, for bumpless build-up layers, and expects it to come into use in the second half of the decade. BBUL would support multiple chips, such as two processors and supporting silicon.
:o)
sounds like a bunch of BBUL to me...
Please. It's a great site.
Anyone who makes a page that reminds me that much of Kibo's WebTV page rawks.
Ah, I thought it was "American ...". So obviously I *was* correct...if you buy AMD products, you are anti-American terrorist sympathizers and deserve to be rounded up with Al Qaeda members and put to death for high treason.
what a cheap joke .. i wish all the american flags u were touting after 11th september weren't made in china.
.. and not those 32 bit x86 processors. So you can spend ur time fighting against AMD or whatever u wish.
Anyway I use Power4 workstation, yes
Or maybe it's just becuase it fixes some basic problem? Just becuase they "urge" an upgrade and don't say why (though that would be nice), and don't specifically reply that it's a security problem, doesn't mean it is a security problem.
Just because they don't say anything about security means they are going the MS route of security through obscurity. Remember, the holes found in MS's software is found by 3rd parties, documented, and THEN MS denies it, doesn't patch it for days/weeks, or calls it a feature.
Do you have any evidence what-so-ever that this upgrade has anything to do with security issues? No? Then shut the fuck up, troll.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Your post really demostrates that your are ignorant of what you're posting about.
AMD is not copying Intel's IP. If they were, Intel would be winning the suits against AMD, not losing them as they have been. AMD has reverse-engineered the x86 instruction set that has been around for quite some time, but implemented in silicon differently. The end result is greater performance, as evidenced by any benchmark you care to run. Like it or not, the fastest x86 processor on the planet right now, even according to Intel's own benchmark suite, is the Athlon XP 2000+.
And to further add insult to your injury, AMD doesn't stand for "American Micro Devices", it stands for Advanced Micro Devices. If you'd done the slightest bit of reading, researching, or thinking before you posted your previous comment, you'd know that.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I think we should wait for intel's announcement abt northwood on monday. they are on 0.13 micron with larger caches. so that will boost their benchmark ranking.
That's nothing. I left my house right here before I went to the bar, and now it's missing. Does anybody know who moved my house?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I have no problem with the page -- the message is accurate and the advice is good. I do have a problem with using lies to get people to go there.. "Yeah, I met Jesus when this guy lied to me.."
hmm, looks like John lost the domain name and a squatter moved in. Try John's home page. A quick search for "john kirch unix nt" found German Japanese and Spanish translations in the top ten results. Google re-translated the German version better than the Spanish version. That probably has more to do with the translation from English than with Google's translation back to English. YMMV
What about the IBM/Motorolla PowerPC chips? American made, and more efficient per cycle than Intel's chips (except for maybe the Itanium).
And you tout Intel for get thermal protection working?! Howabout some chips that don't need thermal protection (like the recent iMacs which can cool themselves with ONLY air convection [meaning no fans for you lesser literates])?
Next thing you know, you'll be crowing about MS's innovation of the GUI over Xerox's... ah.... GUI?!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
When You have Software bloat,Slow SloW SLOW buses,(almost)unresponsive harddrives and low bandwidth????
Wanted : A Signature.
I have nothing against the Motorola's, except for the fact that Motorola is irrelevant and the company is on its last legs financially.
:-)
I suppose if a two-bit company like Apple can survive this long though, maybe Motorola can stay afloat for another quarter.
first things first, i didn't read the article (yet) =) so, i may be completely off base.
.5 billion transistors employed to decode x86 instructions. thats got to be better than using 2million of them to decode a simple risc isa"
also, a large important factor is the use of those billion transistors. it could be used as a large onboard cache, or a massivly parallel adder, or something completely useless. and the something completely useless part is probably what intel will produce, not because their produces are crap necessarily, but because they continually use that pathetic x86 architecure. no matter how many clever tricks you use to decode, how many stages you make a pipeline, and how risc-like your core is, the external instruction set is still a severe limiting factor. it becomes uneconomical (in theory) compared to simpler alternatives. At least, with ia32 it is awful (excited me in middle school, then i realized how toy-like it was compared to something useful, like a mips or an ibm ppc or something). im not as sure about the ia64 architecture. if they're going to make something that sophisticated, i'd hate to see it blown by lousy implimentation. "yay, my cpu has
Hi
Just want to let you know AMD is American:
AMD is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California:
One AMD Place
P.O. Box 3453
Sunnyvale CA 94088
800-538-8450
What we've all been waiting for...a gigazistor! Enjoy it while you can. No doubt, sooner or later, the LinguisticallyCorrectNazis from Academia will change the name to gibizistor.
cat
Yeah, and the P15 is supposed to be able to run 3, count 'em, 3 applications at the same time without freezing the system!
Maybe I'm wrong, and if I am, I'll just crawl back in to my hole and shut up.
But the article claims that the new technology will allow them to *embed* the
processor(s) inside the casing material, unlike today where the core actually
sticks out above the packaging.
But the advantage, as I see it, to having the core *above* the packaging, is
that heatsinks, thermal grease, etc... all have direct (or extremely close
to direct) contact with the core - which is what generates the heat. Mabye
in reducing voltage, heat output will drop significantly, but I digress.
With the core embedded in the casing, it would seem hard to help cool the core
when a heatsink doesn't have direct contact.
I may be wrong, and in that case just ignore this comment, but I don't know
how Intel would plan on dealing with that as a problem (if it in fact is one).
Just as C programming made a 12-MHz 80286 almost as powerful as a 4-MHz Z-80 programmed in hand-tuned assembly language, the multiply abstract and fantastically elegant languages of the future will make those terahertz machines almost as powerful for real work as a TRS-80 Model 1 programmed in Level II BASIC.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Does this mean faster pr0n?!
Mod me down, fine with me, it's my real karma I try to keep up.
The funny thing is that people thought the chips would get cooler when the gate sizes got smaller. Obviously this is not happening. But the thing is this - if the package is getting bumpless, the real challenge is getting the power through the package and onto the power mesh of the chip. Plus, will the new package substrates thermally match to the system boards they will be attached to? By the time Intel intends to have sub 50nm line widths, the die power is supposed to approach something close to your garden variety NUCLEAR REACTOR.
Then you have the issue of signal integrity, particularly for high-speed analog and differential pair signals, which smaller traces only aggravate. The most advanced flip chip packages in the world currently push around 2000 connections for power and signals. This will only get more aggravated and congested at the board and package level as the level of integration increases due to the feature size decreases on the silicon. Small lines increase impedances, and merely cutting layers away will NOT help. Differential signals are supposed to be pushing 40Gb/s per pair in a year or so using modulation on top of differential signaling, so what are they expecting that these packages will be supporting when they have such strict routing requirements both in the signal and redistribution layer routing AND through the package? Not to mention the fact that they still have to attach these monsters using a substitute to lead solder to avoid alpha particles causing false switching in already small noise margins.
Instead, you need different package materials than simple organic laminate subtrate and different silicon process materials than silicon dioxide and tungsten vias. When it gets to this, they have to rely on material science, which is the gating factor in a lot of science right now. I don't believe that Intel's core competency includes material science per se, so they'll be relying on outside companies and research labs for a good chunk of the new materials. Since this is out of their direct control, I don't see how they can deterministically schedule their packaging roadmap - not without forming clear strategic alliances with companies whose core competencies lie in material science related to the above-listed materials. I wish them all the luck and blessings in getting there though.
Firstly they did mention reducing gate leakage current by a factor of 3 i believe which means the chip will produce a lot less heat.
As for embedding the core in the packaging - it's probably a great bonus. As has been pointed out this means that the top of your chip will be completely flush so you'll hopefully get better thermal transfer since you have a bigger surface area.
On a current intel chip the space between the packaging and the heatsink is currently acting as an insulator (since air does that best when it's not moving).
In addition to this, I would speculate that if the core is embedded into the packaging it might allow for small heat pipes to run directly into the core, allowing particularly hot areas of the chip to have additional passive cooling.
That said, given fabrication facilities i'd struggle to make even a single pnp transistor and whilst i could probably remember how to build simple mos (and hence cmos) gates - i'd struggle to replicate what intel was doing in the 70s... so dont take me as any sort of authority on this one.
Who needs a BILLION transistors in a processor, for crying out loud?! Let me tell you something. A slow 4- or 8-bit processor can execute amazing things when coded correctly. Embedded developers have interfaced these processors to memory, hard drives, CD-ROMs, the ISA and PCI busses, and just about every kind of peripheral out there. I'm beginning to think that a fully functional and FAST computer can be built with NO x86 processor, but with about $20.00 (US) worth of these cheap, slow and small processors. It's the software that needs to be engineered correctly, and I'm afraid that nearly all software out there isn't.
What happened to the good ol' days when programmers--real programmers--wrote very clever, small and fast programs? When it had to be written correctly or it didn't work?
Try explaining to me why nearly all hardware needs to be engineered correctly, for a minimum of components and a maximum of performance, yet nearly all software is slopped together, taking up tens or hundreds of megs and running noticeably slow on today's powerhouse machines. You know what? There's no excuse.
I've seen a hard real time operating system coded in 700 words. I've seen processors with 128 bytes of RAM control industrial robotics. Speaking of industrial stuff, I've seen an automation system that packs a real time operating system, high speed communication, interactive user interface (including full control of the display hardware), and all the automation software... in 20 kilobytes. Seeing this, I cannot understand why something simple like a word processor program should be several megs in size (and why it should hog a ton of memory).
So back to the billion transistors question... why? Why should the processor have to predict the next mess of instructions, load them into a cache, find out it predicted incorrectly, dump the cache, find the correct location, load the instructions... Why are processors marketed by their internal clock speed when they spend most of their time waiting for data? And above all, why does software suck so badly?
OH WELL.
The Lord of the Rings. The book rocks. The movie sucks. Yeah, it SUCKS! I left the theater halfway through it. It SUCKS! But the book is awesome.
OH WELL.
If you want to see a real troll, check this out.
But when am i... going to get a hard drive that can keep up or ram that can run at the clock speed i'd much rather MRAM (Magnetic RAM) that a Processor that will idle most of time except the most extreme calculations
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Oh no doubt Northwood will make things very interesting. I'm looking forward to it! The only problem here is that Intel is going to charge around $600 for the first Northwoods out there, and AMD's going to be releasing their 2000+ about the same time for 2/3 the price (or less).
Since I do a lot of 3D rendering work, the Athlon has somewhat of an advantage, even moreso than normal, because of its incredible FPU. I don't think Northwood has a revamped FPU, so I really don't think even a 2.2Ghz Northwood is going to beat an Athlon 2000+, much less a dual setup.
Still, newer processors mean lower prices for everything else. What's there to lose? I love it!
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Actually, converting x86 instructions to equivilant RISC instructions can be done relatively quickly and cheaply. Intel's chips are by no means limited by their ability to convert x86 instructions to RISC instructions.
.5 billion transistors employed to decode x86 instructions." is completely off-base. in a .5 billion transistor CPU, perhaps 10,000 or even 100,000 transistors might decode the x86 instructions, but the rest would be a RISC CPU.
Essentially, you break your instructions down into instructions that map directly to RISC instructions, and those that need to be replaced with two or more instructions. You send the former through with little modification, and you use an associative memory a bit of logic to convert the former. Small associative memories are easily to implement in hardware, and I think you can see that the rest is trivial. This can be done in parallel, so if you can decode fast enough you can just add a couple more decoding units (you still only need one memory).
Your comment "yay, my cpu has
FYI, with the IA64 Intel ditched x86 for their EPIC architecture. Not to get the advantages of RISC, but to get the compiler involved in scheduling which instructions get executed in parallel.
He refuted the whole parent discussion.
What about the IBM/Motorolla PowerPC chips? American made, and more efficient per cycle than Intel's chips (except for maybe the Itanium).
:)
Intel has quite a few fab plants in America.
And you tout Intel for get thermal protection working?! Howabout some chips that don't need thermal protection (like the recent iMacs which can cool themselves with ONLY air convection [meaning no fans for you lesser literates])?
Yeah? How about the Pentium III in the Xbox (no fan).
The thing about Motorolla's chips is they may be more "efficient", but that's not good nor bad. It can't clock is high, but it's more "efficient". However, they can't really scale well at all. Boo.
Thought for today: why do HTDV receivers cost so much? A GeForce 3 board has 35 million transistors in the CPU, 64MB of RAM, and costs under $200 at retail. The radio part of a cell phone, which is more elaborate than the radio receiver for HDTV, has a parts cost of about $10. $600 will buy a pretty good computer, monitor and all. Why do HDTV receivers cost upwards of $500 without a display device?
Linux? Original? Nope. Cloning Unix has been done, using a diverse group of developers has been done, giving it away has been done.
Sure, Linux is very successful, but not original.
That said, this thread is a load of shit. No one has a lock on innovation.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Well, since Intel wants to own the chipset business, it probably won't happen. Of course, Intel actually did own the chipset business until it got too cozy with Rambus...
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
I'll probably get ripped a new one for mentioning this... but...
:) - seriously. Even though they are largely unsupported (compared to 5~6 years ago) 16 megs of ram is still a colassal amount of memory for your average Amiga - and they can do just about anything your desktop PC can do now.
Go out and buy an Amiga
Anyhoo - the way I justify software bloat is that hardware is so cheap these days does it really matter? I mean on a desktop level...
My favorite comment about memory and the Amiga - was an issue of Amiga Format that had a full (older) copy of Real 3D - which was one of the first programs to ever do particle kenimatics. Anyhoo - the label said "warning requires at least 4 megs of ram" - I probably have the disk around here somewhere if someone doesn't believe me.
Anyhoo - software is bloated sure, but does it make any difference when hardware is so cheap?
AGHHHHHHHHHHHH
That would be the second most annoying Parachurch Industries web site I have every seen!
How is it the biggest semiconductor manufacturer in the solar system is on its last legs?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Still, newer processors mean lower prices for everything else. What's there to lose? I love it!
Any slight hope of resale of your old kit?
Not that that is a new thing, I still have more or less every PC I've owned, just because they are more use to me that the £50-300 I'd get by selling them.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
What about the IBM/Motorolla PowerPC chips? American made, and more efficient per cycle than Intel's chips (except for maybe the Itanium).
I don't think "American Made" is a significant point when deciding on a processor...
Where does one get ATX-format boards and processors to be able to build these ultra-quiet, ultra-fast marvels? (Seriously - I like quiet PCs, but I don't much like Macs, so that would be a nice LinuxPPC box, potentially).
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Even if Intel creates a processor with 1 trillion transistors tomorrow, it does not matter. The bottleneck on the PC is at the bus and at the storage devices, which are way too slow for todays CPUs.
Instead of bringing a better architecture to the PC, with more parallelism, etc all we hear about is about the CPU. Even the Playstation 2 has 48 GB/sec data throughput in its buses(I do not know if this is sustained or peak, though, I am just quoting what I remember).
The PC needs a faster bus, definitely.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Luddite.
Let's do a little thinking, shall we? Let's say one company (JBM, for example) comes out with wiz-bang "technology of the future!(tm)" written in a 10th generation language and sells more and more copies of it, and it is hailed as the next platform for computing. Now along comes Nicrosoft who takes the same concept, bundles it in every operating system but writes their version in C or C++ (making it 100 times faster). Which one would YOU use?
Can you imagine if we exported a Beowulf cluster of these?
I appreciate the offer, but I keep pretty much all my boxes around for additional rendering power. As it is I have 5 dual AMD systems, three single-proc AMD systems, one Intel dual, and two Intel singles. No P4's at all -- the P-III FPU runs circles around the P4 even at lower clock rates. Need an example? I recently installed Powerleap's (www.powerleap.com) iP3-L/T converter than allowed me to stick a 1.2Ghz Tualatin Celeron into one of my older BX-based Slot1 systems. There result? The 1.2Ghz system is, clock for clock, about 90% as fast as an equivalently clocked Athlon. I've overclocked it to 1.3Ghz already and it flies quite nicely. Still gets spanked by the dual Athlon's, though.
Intel is so full of shit it ain't even funny, saying the P4 is better than the P-III. If Intel had spent time shrinking the P-III die instead of going megahertz-happy with the P4, they'd still be producing good stuff. 3D folks are avoiding the P4 like the plague.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I actually meant that 'any hope of selling your old kit' was what you had to lose by ever-faster and ever-cheaper processors :)
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"