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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."
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
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.
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
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).
You need to look at what's driving processor design these days. It isn't word processing and spreadsheets, that's for sure. There are only four areas that I can think of that are really driving the desire for more and more transistors:
#1 - Larger memory sizes. Terabyte databases require terabytes of RAM. Current 32-bit processors can't touch that with a 10-bit pole. Even the most elegant 4- and 8-bit processors can't do anything about their memory addressing limitations without huge kludges.
#2 - Engineering/Scientific problems. Ever try to model the fluid/thermal dynamics of a star? You need ungodly amounts of processor power to do this properly, or ungodly numbers of processors. Preferrably both.
#3 - 3D multimedia and design. This is my area of work. I've got five (count 'em, five) dual Athlons right this moment rendering like mad, churning through a 1 hour 3D animated sequence with lots of volumetric lights, NURBS, and tons of polygons. 3D eats cycles like they're going out of style, and in my business if you can cut your render time in half, you've just doubled your production capability. You can never buy enough render power.
#4 - Gaming. Yes, games. Doom. Quake. Doom II. Quake 2. Quake 3. Unreal Tournament. Every game pushes the triangle count, texture resolution, and framerate to higher highs. Photorealism is the holy grail, and it's going to take absurd amounts of transistors running at an unheard of clockrate to do this.
You'll note that business apps are anywhere in there, and they shouldn't be. Your average desktop processor spends about 99% of its time idle waiting on the operator between keystrokes. Nobody needs a 2Ghz P4 or a 1.6Ghz Athlon for these tasks, despite Intel's propaganda to the contrary.
I know you long for fast, tight code, but that isn't being taught in college anymore (heck, it wasn't even when I went through in 1990). Profs are encouraging rapid design and quick-to-market code over elegant design. It's unfortunate, but the market itself is rewarding this philosophy. I don't agree with it, but the fact is that the company that produces a "good enough" piece of software quickly will generally steamroller a company that produces "elegant" software but comes out later.
After all, beta means alpha, and 1.0 is really an extended beta. Kick it out the door, the marketing campaign is scheduled to start! Who cares if it works, we can always patch it later or put the bugfixes in version 2.0!
Oh, and I strongly disagree with your assessment of Lord of the Rings. I found it a very good adaptation of such a sprawling book. What did you dislike about it so much that you descend to profanity to describe 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
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?