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Intel's Haswell Moves Voltage Regulator On-Die
MojoKid writes "For the past decade, AMD and Intel have been racing each other to incorporate more components into the CPU die. Memory controllers, integrated GPUs, northbridges, and southbridges have all moved closer to a single package, known as SoCs (system-on-a-chip). Now, with Haswell, Intel is set to integrate another important piece of circuitry. When it launches next month, Haswell will be the first x86 CPU to include an on-die voltage regulator module, or VRM. Haswell incorporates a refined VRM on-die that allows for multiple voltage rails and controls voltage for the CPU, on-die GPU, system I/O, integrated memory controller, as well as several other functions. Intel refers to this as a FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator), and it apparently eliminates voltage ripple and is significantly more efficient than your traditional motherboard VRM. Added bonus? It's 1/50th the size."
Update: 05/14 01:22 GMT by U L : Reader AdamHaun comments: "They already have a test chip that they used to power a ~90W Xeon E7330 for four hours while it ran Linpack. ... Voltage ripple is less than 2mV. Peak efficiency per cell looks like ~76% at 8A. They claim hitting 82% would be easy..." and links to a presentation on the integrated VRM (PDF).
come guys, comment, so I know how excited I should be
with the on die regulator, won't that area of the chip be a tad warmer than the rest of the chip, or will the heat be a moot point?
Intel refers to this as a FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator), and it apparently eliminates voltage ripple and is significantly more efficient than your traditional motherboard VRM. Added bonus? It's 1/50th the size."
I have yet to come across a voltage regulator that doesn't run hot. Typically, it's one of the hottest components in an electrical circuit. And we're integrated this into a slab of silicon already well-known for getting so hot it can catch fire?
Can someone please tell me why this is a good idea, because all of my experience in electrical engineering says that when things heat up, they become more unstable and prone to failure, and the one thing you do not want going critical is your voltage regulator. If that goes, the whole computer catches fire.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I don't want to delid my Haswell CPU.
As long as incorporating logical features to a chip is nice, is it prudent to incorporate such risky function to it? Wouldn't it become more vulnerable to highly out of control voltage variations? Will it become more easy to burn?
Interesting possibilities but as TFA says, it could cause a lot of pain for overclockers.
You can find the full slide set in PDF format here.
If I read this right, it really is a fully on-chip switching regulator, inductors and all. They already have a test chip that they used to power a ~90W Xeon E7330 for four hours while it ran Linpack. (Or a virus -- it says Linpack in the summary page.) Voltage ripple is less than 2mV. Peak efficiency per cell looks like ~76% at 8A. They claim hitting 82% would be easy, and there are "additional advancements that cannot be reported at this time" planned for the future.
The slides have bunch of other technical details about testability features, too, which is always neat to see.
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An on-die power controller still needs to have external capacitors, especially at the power levels we're talking about.
But, the problem areas in a switching supply are EMI and stray inductances on the board slowing down the turnon of the mosfet. Because the turnon is slowed down, the mosfet spends time in the ohmic region, which creates excess heat.
An on-die gate driver routed directly to the gate with no trace length has no stray inductance, and an on-die gate probably also has less capacitance than a discrete component. So, switching times are much much faster, and there is far less loss per cycle in the ohmic region. That's a Good Thing(TM).
EMI will also be reduced just because there aren't a bunch of high speed traces running around, and the thing can run in the multi-MHz range, so less energy is switched per cycle, and maybe even the switch inductor can even be small enough to simply be drawn in silicon.
I would not be surprised to see efficiency in the 95+% range even coming from 12V down to 0.9V or whatever voltage this thing runs at, so you'll be throwing an extra 6W or so into a 120W package. Not bad.
Wake me up when they move the keyboard on-die.
That's some amazing work. The current state of the art in CPU power supply designs hasn't changed in 15 years. 12V in, low voltage out, and the output voltage has been moving lower and lower for years, with designs below 1 V. If you figure you had a few percent of tolerance in the early years when everything ran off 2.5V and that few percent remains constant, then at 1 V you have almost no room for slop. So there are a lot of output capacitors there, both those electrolytics (you always hear people complaining about them but they're CHEAP) and ceramics. The ceramics cost a fortune and you need a lot of them to get your tolerance down - the first half microsecond of a load step is entirely the ceramic capacitor's response, not the controller or anything else. Moving part of the VR onboard allows them to reduce the parasitics significantly and they can probably tolerate a little higher tolerance as a result, but moreover they can get rid of some of those ceramics in the whole system - ultimately many of those on the motherboard.
So this is taking a lot of cake out of company mouths. Analog, Intersil, IRF, ON, who else - manufacturers of controllers, MOSFETs. Inductors, ceramic and 'lytic vendors are all going to lose out a bit here. Potentially Intel can reduce the platform cost vs. AMD as well, which is interesting. There is still an onboard VR but it will be 12 - 2.4 V, wherever they think the sweet spot is for efficiency and size. And the first real change in this industry for a long time. Cool work.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
... that they can incorporate the inductor and capacitors for a 90 W switchmode regulator onto silicon. This is a breakthrough in physics, not just in semiconductor processing.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
and dump my Maxim stock!
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
So we have some slides for a February 2010 presentation, about a widely known technology thats going to be included in some upcoming parts.
Now here is something more news like: Today http://hothardware.com/ posted an article calming to be news, but was actually just a portion of an 2010 Intel slide deck with the date and copyright removed. Tech fans seem excited by their content, but are ignoring the illegal complete lack of attribution regarding the stolen slides, as well as the fact that there is no actual news there.
Being 1/50th the size it will be welcome on mobile devices. Not sure that its a good thing for your gaming desktop.
That 84 watts is going to rip through your mobile device's battery pretty damn fast.
Don't we need to compare it to a traditional regulator implementation before we come to that conclusion? Assuming pretty damn fast means faster than current Atom based devices.
CPU chips are performance-limited by heat. Adding the regulator on-chip, dumping heat into the chip without adding processing capability, is a net loss.By making the chip bigger, it decreases yield and makes it more expensive to produce. Lose-lose.
For moderate-performance applications where CPU yield is already high, the cost reduction achieved by simplifying the motherboard might make this a winner.
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'Nuff said.
With the 100 MHz cycle and sixteen phases, the output capacitors have to hold up the output for less than a nanosecond, as there
is a new pulse every 10 nS / 16 = 0.625 nS.
Very impressive indeed.
Many thanks for the link to the PDF of the presentation.
This technology could have application in AM broadcast band radio transmitters, and in audio power amplifiers.
Peter Traneus Anderson
nothing says progress like a good ol house fire
Now, if only the performance increase over Ivy Bridge was more than a handful of percent....
It's a shame AMD and Intel are both coasting along at the moment. TBH there's very little incentive for desktop users to upgrade from Sandy Bridge, since then performance increases have been miniscule.
If you'd read at least the summary, the benefit would be less ripple. Because it takes time to get the feedback voltage to the external VRM, there would always be ripple if power demands would fluctuate fast enough. In a typical CPU on a typical load, you get a lot of power load changes, so you'd get a lot of ripple. Ripple means that ultra low power circuitry will be harder to implement and hit limits earlier, since it is more dependent on precise voltages.
Power saving wouldn't be relevant, if you are looking at the power loss in the circuit board traces to the CPU. The efficiency of the internal regulator is lower than that of external voltage regulators so it would probably consume even more power.
System cost would be higher. Other components on the main board still require regulated voltages, so no components would be saved there.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
There are more components on the main board that need voltages regulated. You may be able to skip some parts for specifically the CPU, but the rest of the main board needs clean voltages too. For all the peripheral chips and the PCI bus, you still need all the rest of the voltage regulators and discrete components to make those work.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The heat is one factor in a list of many that limits performance. Others are how precise the voltages are, clock speed, die size and probably more. If you can increase voltage precision and gain more with that than the hit you take with adding the heat, you're still winning overall. Intel clearly got to the point where they could take the heat penalty and still come out winning because of the better voltage regulation.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
re:
The term "virus" in this context means a power virus -- which is an artificial workload designed to draw as much power as possible from the chip.Wow, thanks for the very informative post. It makes sense that being able to deal with full thermal stress would be useful. I've had my quad-core shut down on me once at 20-30 seconds into the boot-up sequence, and then I realized that the heat-sink was not fully applied to or in contact with the CPU surface. I reseated everything and the boot-up sequence went just fine. So I'm really glad that there was an on-die thermal danger detector that shut down my quad-core as the thermal level went to dangerous failure levels. The fact that it's alsodesigned and tested to be actually able to withstand a full power-load draw for a fixed interval is even more impressive.
Here's a link to the wikipedia page about a "Power Virus". And there's an Intel link about "Thermal performance challenges from Silicon to systems" there on the wikipedia page which is a dead link: http://download.intel.com/technology/itj/q32000/pdf/thermal_perf.pdf .
Given the performance of the on-die voltage regulator, the chip could very useful for designing miniature power supplies. Unfortunately the CPU and the associated digital crap ruin what seems to be a very succesful design of an innovative power supply regulator.
(Score:-1, Unslashdotian)
Guys, the real reason why it's a good idea has to do with (parasitic) trace inductance and not so much with resistive losses!
CPUs don't draw steady current. The average may be 30A or so, but the peaks can be much much higher. And that's the real problem: sudden changes in current (delta I) create time varying magnetic fields around the power traces/pins/wires according to Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction which, by Lenz's law, oppose the changes in currect that created them. The effect is that the supply voltage seen by the processor sags whever its current demand quickly rises (and, conversely, the voltage will jump whenever the current deman falls abruptly!).
You can mitigate this to some extend by adding decoupling capacitors, but this gets you only so far before it becomes more efficient to just move the regulator on chip.
Why is this moded up when it is mostly incorrect or irrelevant?
Those relationships are derived from the physics about electron exchange between different materials.
Ohm's law in most cases is an empirical relationship, not derived from physics of electron properties. And as such, it is an approximation, great in some contexts, inaccurate in others, and flat out useless in many other situations.
The talk of complex impedance is pretty much irrelevant. A switching power supply is not going to be Ohmic, complex impedance or not. E.g. increasing the voltage supplied to a switching supply will reduce the current drawn from the source.
I looked through everyone's comments, hoping to see this important issue and everyone's too busy debating silly shit like heat. When is the end-effect of paradigm shifting ever the same as the issue a company portrays to the public? Did everyone think "Microsoft Open Technologies" was a true attempt at embracing open source software?
Let's look at what's actually going on:
The end result?
Intel is working to take away the control people have over their processors. Whether this is the final step, or just a means to an even bigger end, we should be asking more questions.
Faster and smaller and more ... the shrinking industry ... soon they'll get down to the atom ... and then the subatomic ... it all based on photography, the principles thereof ... the universe is vast, the understanding of it ... "For the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isa 55:9