CSC 456 Spring 2012/ch1 BC

Processor Improvement

From page 2 of Solihin, the change in transistor counts from 1971-2006 is mentioned to have increased from 2,300 to 167 million, a 72,608x increase. From 2006-2012 the increase in the number of transistors on a chip has grown from 167 million to 2.6 billion, a 15x increase.<ref name="trans count"/>

Also from page 2, it is mentioned that the clock frequency of processors grew from 750 KHz to 2.4 GHz between 1971-2006, a 3,200x increase. From 2006-2012 the clock frequency has increased from 2.4ghz to 5.2, a 2.2x increase.<ref name="proc chrono"/>

The following facts have been updated from the original list on page 4 of Solihin:

• IBM now has the 16-core processor Power PC A2
• Intel has the 10 core Xeon E7
• AMD has the 16 Opteron Interlagos
• Sun has the 8-core Niagara.<ref name="xeon"/><ref name="powerpc"/><ref name="amd"/><ref name="sun"/>

Tables

The following table shows the improvement in Intel processors since 1971. The bold items are Intel processors that have come out since the book was written. Original table can be found on page 4 of the book.

Evolution of Intel Processors<ref name="intel procs"/>
From	Procs	Specifications	New Features
1971	4004	740KHz, 2300 transistors, 10 micrometers, 640B addressable memory, 4KB program memory
1978	8086	16-bit, 5-10MHz, 29000 transistors at 3 micrometers, 1MB addressable memory
1982	80286	8-12.5MHz	Virtual memory and protection mode
1985	386	32-bit, 16-33MHz, 275K transistors, 4GB addressable memory	Pipelining
1989	486	25-100MHz, 1.5M transistors	FPU integration
1993	Pentium	60-200MHz	On-chip L1 caches and SMP suport
1995	Pentium Pro	16KB L1 caches, 5.5M transistors	OOO execution
1997	Pentium MMX	233-450MHz, 32KB L1 cache, 4.5M transistors	Dynamic branch prediction, MMX instruction sets
1999	Pentium III	450-1400MHz, 256KB L2 cache on chip, 28M transistors	SSE instruction sets
2000	Pentium IV	1.4-3GHz, 55M transistors	Hyperpipelining and SMT
2006	Xeon	64-bit, 2GHz, 167M transistors, 4MB L2 cache on chip	Dual-core and virtualization support
2008	Intel Core i7	64-bit, 3.2GHz, 730M transistors, 4 core
2010	Intel Xeon "Nehalem-EX"	64-bit, 2.66GHz, 2300M transistors, 8 core
2011	Intel Xeon E7	64-bit, 2.67GHz, 2600M transistors, 10 core	First Intel chip with 10 processors

The following table is a revised version of the one on page 8 of Solihin listing some examples of current high end multicore processors.

Examples of Current Multicore Processors<ref name="z196"/><ref name="xeon"/>
Name	# Cores	Clock Freq	Clock Type	Caches	Chip Power
IBM z196	4 cores	5.3GHz	OOO Superscalar	128KB L1, 1.5MB L2, 24MB L3, 192MB L4	1800W
Intel Xeon E	10 cores	2.67GHz	SIMD	64KB L1, 256KB L2, 30MB L3	130W

Top Trends

Super Computers

The top rated super computer for November 2011 is Japan's "K Computer", rated by top500.org.<ref name="top2011"/> The K Computer operates at 10.51 petaflop/s with 705,024 cores and is the first to break the 10 petaflop/s barrier. Just one year earlier the highest rated supercomputer was China's Tianhe-1A at 2.57 petaflop/s, 1/4 as fast as the K Computer.

This is the second top500 list in a row that the K Computer stayed in first place. In fact, none of the top 10 changed, which is mentioned here by TOP500 editor Erich Strohmaier, "This is the first time since we began publishing the list back in 1993 that the top 10 systems showed no turnover".<ref name="top2011"/> This shows that the improvement in potential processing power has started to slow down. This observation combined with the reduction in transistor count and clock frequency growth described earlier would suggest that we are approaching the "wall" of processing capabilities.

Cluster Computing

Since June 2006, the trending supercomputer architecture has gone towards cluster computing. Cluster architecture usage has gone from 72% in 2006 to 82% in 2011, while Constellation has gone from 7.6% to 0%.<ref name="topstats"/>

References

<references> <ref name="trans count">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count </ref> <ref name="proc chrono">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor_chronologyref </ref> <ref name="intel procs">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_microprocessors </ref> <ref name="z196">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z196_(microprocessor) </ref> <ref name="xeon">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture)#Westmere </ref> <ref name="powerpc">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_A2 </ref> <ref name="amd">http://www.tomshardware.com/news/interlagos-bulldozer-opteron-16-core-valencia,13984.html </ref> <ref name="sun">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 </ref> <ref name="top2011">http://top500.org/lists/2011/11</ref> <ref name="topstats">http://i.top500.org/stats</ref> </references>