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Chipmakers Are Taking New Paths to Performance: Multicore Systems and Better Designs Ramp Up Speed and Efficiency

Posted on: Tuesday, 14 February 2006, 12:00 CST

By Victor Godinez, The Dallas Morning News

Feb. 14--Moore's Law marches on.

But it's clearly headed in a different direction.

Named after Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore, Moore's Law is a simple observation that the industry is generally able to double the number of transistors on a single computer chip every two years or so.

Over time, though, Moore's Law became synonymous with equally dramatic increases in the chips' speeds.

As companies packed more transistors on a processor, they used that extra technology to increase the speed of the chip, like adding more horsepower to a car engine.

But physical barriers are starting to make those raw horsepower gains harder and more expensive to achieve, and even when they can make those gains, the chips are starting to run at fantastically high temperatures.

As a result, the major chipmakers -- from Intel to AMD to IBM to Texas Instruments -- are rethinking how they design their products so that overall computer performance continues to increase.

Whether it's designing chips that consume less power, or putting several processors on a single piece of silicon or building chips that can process much larger chunks of data at a time, it's clear the megahertz mantra is over.

"We're transitioning to a new mechanism," said Bernie Meyerson, who oversees the chip division at International Business Machines Corp. "That's the good news.

"You're going to see a shift basically in the mechanisms by which you achieve those gains," he said. "But those gains will continue."

Mr. Meyerson and others said the most popular way to ramp up processor performance now is by putting multiple processors on a single chip, creating what's known as a multicore system.

"It is vastly more efficient to use much slower processors, in terms of the power per computation, and combine those, as opposed to trying to make one go like a bat out of hell," Mr. Meyerson said.

For consumers, that means the end of being able to use chip speed to rank processors.

But it also means that the pace of technological progress isn't going to slow down any time soon.

The new approach to boosting performance can be seen in a range of products.

Microsoft Corp.'s new Xbox 360 video game console, for example, sports a triple-core chip from IBM, with each core running at 3.2 gigahertz.

Sony Corp.'s upcoming PlayStation 3 game machine will sport an IBM-designed multicore processor of its own.

And dual-core processors from Intel power the new machines unveiled by Apple Computer Inc. last month in San Francisco.

64-bit chips

Another major design change has been the move towards 64-bit chips, which can process more data at a time than their 32-bit predecessors.

Brian Wing, a personal shopping assistant at the Best Buy store in Frisco on Preston Road, said the move towards multicore systems and 64-bit chips has changed the way he sells computers.

"We're doing a lot more educating about what the chips will do," he said. "It has presented a change, because we're having to redo what everyone's been taught."

But consumers seem to be adapting, he said.

He noted that Advanced Micro Devices Inc., whose chips generally run slower than competing chips from Intel, has established a reputation as the maker of the most powerful processors for multimedia applications like gaming.

The processor speeds in the new Apple iMacs top out at 2 gigahertz, well behind the 3-gigahertz speed barrier that Intel crossed more than three years ago.

The performance increases that users have seen in their PCs over the last few years didn't come from faster processor speeds, said Intel spokesman Chuck Malloy.

"You could probably keep going on the speed, but the wall you hit is heat and power consumption," he said.

Even if heat weren't a problem, the cost of making faster chips is escalating, with new manufacturing plants easily costing several billion dollars.

Exploring other routes is less expensive, Mr. Malloy said.

"The overall rate of performance gains will not slow down, but performance will come to users in a different fashion," he said. "It will come in the form of multiprocessing, better designs, more efficient designs."

A multicore processor essentially lets you do multiple tasks at once without making your machine struggle to keep up.

For example, a multicore PC would let you copy music or movies to a DVD in the background while you play a computer game or stream a video off the Internet, with all the tasks running at top speed.

"The industry has been heading this direction for quite some time," Mr. Malloy said.

In August 2001, Intel launched its 2-gigahertz Pentium chip.

A little over a year later, in November 2002, Intel boasted that it had produced the world's first 3-gigahertz commercial microprocessor.

Since then, Intel has released plenty of chips with better overall performance.

But the push for a faster processor has screeched nearly to a halt.

While the slowdown is most apparent for Intel, which regularly touted processor speeds as the best way to measure chip performance, most semiconductor makers are grappling with the fact that they can no longer just dump a faster engine under the hood and hit the gas pedal.

Dr. Bob Doering, a senior fellow and technology strategy manager at Texas Instruments Inc., noted that the basic premise of Moore's Law is still true.

"In the traditional terms of Moore's Law, where you're just talking about transistors per chip, we're moving along really about as fast as we ever have," he said.

But those transistors are being put to new uses.

"Intel got us in the habit for many years -- it played into their market strategy -- to talk about megahertz," Dr. Doering said. "They talked about megahertz and that was it."

TI processors

TI is perhaps best known for its digital signal processors, which power cellphones and other devices, rather than desktop or laptop computers.

But those processors are subject to the same physical laws as Intel's Pentium chips, and TI has adopted many of the new design elements that other chipmakers have.

For example, the company makes multicore digital signal processors, and is developing energy-saving features for its chips.

Craig Sander, corporate vice president of technology development at AMD, said innovations like 64-bit and multicore processors will continue to proliferate thanks to Moore's Law.

"We're still on track with Moore's Law," he said. "It can't go on forever, but it can probably go on longer than some people think."

E-mail vgodinez@dallasnews.com

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Source: The Dallas Morning News

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