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Inside Intel
z71offroad writes: "There is a really interesting article at Anandtech right now showing what goes on inside Intel Labs. Although it doesnt break any NDAs, it is still a facinating look at what goes on inside the chip giant's labs."
No, it's synonymous with silicom.999999999999
doesn't everyone just breakdance in radiation suits all day?
I think Intel does need to jump off it's approach to sales by clock speed.
Maybe instead of constantly worrying about clock speeds they spend more research into being able to add larger amounts of cache or try to achieve one clock cycle access to main memory
Yes chips will most likely continue to follow moore's law but computers are not much faster now than 2 years ago
what their worries should be
It has some pretty interesting info regarding what goes on around Intel.
Did we really need a /. article on this?
Initially there were two other focus areas for the R&D team,
but that was before they decided to get rid of the dancing guys
in the shiny bunny outfits.
1)Performance
2)Power
3)Integrity
4)Functionality
5)Tools and Methods
6)Originality
7)Choreography
Basically, Itanium was designed to address the "efficiency" issue, as well as enabling faster turnaround on new designs with a simpler core.
We all know how that turned out, don't we? Fundamentally, Intel is trapped by their own success. They haven't successfully introduced a really new architecture since the i860/i960, and that was YEARS ago.
People don't want "efficient" ot "elegant" processors. They want MegaHertz.
-Mark
is the picture of the 10 GHz ALU test screen here. I just like the way they have the Windows Calculator next to the test screen, in order to check whether 2147483646 + 1 really is equal to 2147483647.
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
The types of tests run in the CV labs range from network tests to playing games (which seemed to gather the majority of the CV engineers).
All I gots to say is how do I become a CV Engineer. Getting payed to "test" the stability of chips during games.
Uhh, no I dont think 20 hours of straight counter-strike is rigorous enough, we should do at least 20 more, for quality purpouses.
No, seriously I need a job!
th very first sentence in this article states th perception th article is focussed on diminishing
really? - as a for-profit company, perhaps their shareholders might be interested in them making maximum profit as well?
and who is this 'we' - only a single authour is mentioned at th top of th article - or perhaps his name has simply been appended to a pre-prepared puff piece?another example of rhetorical writing pulled from th first few paragraphs
very talented engineers [who] are focused on pushing the limits of technology
ok - there may be real information contained in this article - but frankly there were enough warning signals in th first few paragraphs to tell me my time was better spent elsewhere
All the Pentium 4 ALUs are double pumped, that means a Pentium 4 running at 2.2 Ghz's ALU is running at 4.4Ghz.
And you are still wondering why Pentium 4 is still slower than the Athlon (or awfully close)
Imagine what would happen if the ALU is only running at the same speed as the CPU.
Personally, Intel is losing little ground at a time right now, but remember, Intel can afford to make a couple of mistakes but AMD can't even afford to make on. One mistake will push AMD back to the bottom, again.
kawai
Intel chips, while more commonplace in store-bought computers, still do not measure up to the performance and reliability of AMD. I started long ago with an Intel Celeron 300 slot chipset (hey, I was new to this computer thing; please be gentle!). Later, when I wised up, I built a whole new system around a Duron 750 Socket A. Much better. Even when I ran comparisons on my Duron 750 to faster Intel 3 chips the results were very similar: The Duron outperformed the Intel in just about every aspect! Not only that, but when you consider what clock speed one gets for their dollar, the AMD series has always been faster for cheaper. Reliability is also a factor that goes against Intel. I have heard many horror stories of chips that had great heatsinks and excellent fans, but they still overheated with no overclocking involved. My co-worker, however, runs an awe-inspiring water-cooling system that has leaked many times (poor guy is great at computers, lousy at plumbing) but despite water sitting literally on the chip, the AMD Athlon he was running showed no signs of damage. But, to be fair, I can't just compare prices and reliability. Intel and AMD chips have many, many differences to set them apart. The whole deal breaks down to this, though: When I wanted to upgrade recently to the Athlon XP, I didn't have to go out and buy a new motherboard, different memory, and a special power supply. Actually, all I needed was the chip. Until Intel can effectively compete with AMD's performance, reliability, and cost, I will never, ever own another Intel board again.
"This food is problematic."
Who cares if Intel (or anyone else) makes chip n+1 perform better than chip n through clock cycle speedups, fiddling with cache arrangements, implementing faster-than-light wiring systems on the die :-) . . . whatever. As long as it works faster and cheaper than last year's, what does it matter beyond idle curiosity?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You just got to love all those wires for the wireless network =)
Maybe instead of constantly worrying about clock speeds they spend more research into being able to add larger amounts of cache or try to achieve one clock cycle access to main memory
I'm afraid that both of these (especially the last one) sound like the infamous "let's just find a way to factor huge numbers" quote. That is - yes, it would be wonderful to be able to do this, but there are good reasons for believing that it's very difficult (not that people haven't tried).
For caches, the problem is that larger caches are slower and more power-hungry. To compensate, you use a multilevel cache architecture, but you still have some penalties. A modern foundry could put as much cache as it wanted on to a chip (look at HP's most recent chip for an example) - but because of architectural tradeoffs, this isn't always a good idea.
For memory, if you can find a way to get single-clock access latencies reliably without a 10x slower clock, sell it to $favourite_company and retire on the proceeds. This isn't likely to happen for _two_ reasons. Firstly, modern memory is optimized for density at the expense of speed (this is why we use DRAM and not SRAM for system memory). Secondly, because of the trace lengths, capacitance (and inductance!), and crosstalk and noise issues, it's one _hell_ of a lot harder to send data at low latency _or_ low bandwidth across a motherboard than just within a chip.
There are ways of pushing the boundaries on all of these things, but while we're doing that, processor speeds are still getting faster, putting tougher requirements on the memory and negating most of the relative gain.
In summary, there's a good reason that Intel (along with everyone else) is pursuing more conventional enhancements while background research into memory and caches is going on.
The 10GHz ALU shown was run at room temperature, and was not actually a Pentium 4 ALU at all. While it is true the Pentium 4's ALUs are double pumped, that's because they're actually 16-bit (16 x 2 = 32-bit, thus double pumped).
;)
The 10GHz ALU was a very limited ALU, not part of any modern processor.
Intel is losing little ground at a time right now
Actually, in Q4 2001 Intel gained market share and AMD lost some. But overall in 2001, AMD did gain market share, that's true.
I still think it's because Intel wants to point to AMD and say "See? Competition!".
Intel could easily release faster CPUs right now to totally crush the Athlon, but it doesn't make sense to do so.
Mostly the article seemed to run like the following, well we met some real cool guys in a lab in oregon who research all the new stuff, then we followed all the production to the guy's who QC the design at some other lab somewhere. While trying not to break a NDA
I thought this was a bit like going to Nike and just interviewing the guy who made the prototype for the new gel heel. Or Ford and interviewing the guy who made the new concept Focus while ignoring everyone from Detroit
Not that am trying to troll, I just wanted some interviews with the average workers at their Indonesian fab plant, maybe finding out how what kewl shit they suppy to their employees. I heard that one plant had a fully working video parlor for instance, and that intel had helped to setup schools in the local area (although this is prob marketing BS). Also, rumour has it that people who work there are all closet overclocking freak's since the price of the chips themselves are so low.
I also thought that it might be interesting to see the who hugh some of these factories have become, that in some cases they are as large as small cities, with entire regions depending on there income.
Throw, in some interesting facts like, most of the chinese in indonesia are not normal chinese but rather Hacka, or chinese gypsies who moved to the country due to persecution on the mainland.
Things like that, together with reports from the labs, would have made a much more interesting article IMHO.
Pianist : Some jerk whos taught themselves how to type in rhythm
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A modern foundry could put as much cache as it wanted on to a chip (look at HP's most recent chip for an example) - but because of architectural tradeoffs, this isn't always a good idea.
Oh, I don't know about that. The PA-8700 has 2.25 MB of L2 cache, which is okay I suppose. The MIPS R14000 processors in the SGI Origin 3000 series have 8 MB of L2 cache per CPU, and they do pretty well, to put it mildly. I think your assertion that large secondary caches aren't always a good idea sounds a little weak.
Let's not forget to take a complete look inside intel..., not just at there technology.
FaceIntel.com
Nice company.... NOT!
M0571y H@rml355.
"There is a strong focus on networking and more specifically wireless
networking at Intel. Intel's campus alone is entirely wired for wireless
internet access for their employees."
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Oh, I don't know about that. The PA-8700 has 2.25 MB of L2 cache, which is okay I suppose. The MIPS R14000 processors in the SGI Origin 3000 series have 8 MB of L2 cache per CPU, and they do pretty well, to put it mildly.
Large amounts of cache benefit niche applications. You see huge caches on server chips because a) they happen to run this kind of niche load, and b) servers are optimized for performance above all else, which means a performance gain of a few percent is worth the cost of adding more cache (while a consumer would balk at paying twice as much).
Cache benefits servers that are running many, many tasks at once - a context switch won't necessarily end up purging the cache if it's big enough. Consumer machines don't usually have this kind of load (or we'd all be running dual-processor machines).
Some scientific applications will benefit, but only some of them. The rest either have access patterns that don't lend themselves to cacheing, or use blocking techniques to increase locality enough that even a smaller cache will be adequate (incremental return becomes low beyond a certain point).
For the vast majority of applications, we're already well into the realm of diminishing returns. Simple proof of this: We've had 256k and 512k caches on consumer chips for quite a while. Linewidth is fine enough that we have the ability to put much more cache on without taking a yield penalty. If doubling the cache size was a sure-fire performance boost for consumer chips, both Intel and AMD would have done it already.
My point was that they need to focus more on researching those fields rather than on clock speed.
[...]
Now, im not talking about making lead into gold, im just saying its almost obvious if you want technologically superior chips, you need to invest in the obvious bottleneck, not what the marketing department says is most effective.
And my point is that Intel will market what they expect to be able to put on the shelves next year. *That's* why you hear about their other processor tweaks.
Of *course* Intel is spending money on improving their memory subsystems! But you don't hear about it, because they haven't made any breakthroughs yet (RamBus was the last proposed improvement they invested in, and that failed spectacularly).
It is also in Intel's interest to invest in improvements that are likely to bear fruit quickly. Improving the memory subsystem isn't the only way to improve processor performance, so they're investigating other methods as well.
FYI, If you want to see it yourself firsthand, the openhouse is Saturday the 23rd of Febuary from 10:00 to 3:00. It includes a window tour of the new copper 300mm facility. You will be able to see the new class of automated material handeling. Wafers are no longer carried by hand. It's completely done by robots. Come watch it work. It's at the Ronlar Acres campus just off Cornelius Pass near the new Hillsboro stadium. It's on 229th and Evergreen Parkway. See you there.
The truth shall set you free!