CSC 456 Spring 2012/ch1 BC

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"/>

From 2006-2012 the clock frequency has increased from 2.4ghz to 5.2, a 2.2x increase.<ref name="proc chrono"/>

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

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

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

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