Chapter 1: Nick Nicholls, Albert Chu

Transistor Count

According to the text, since 1971 the number of transistors on a chip has increased from 2,300 to 167 million in 2006. By 2011, the transistor count had further increased to 2.6 billion, a 1,130,434x increase from 1971. The clock frequency has also continued to rise, if a bit slower since 2006. At the time, it was around 2.4GHz, a 3k multiple of the speed in 1971 of 750KHz. Now the high end clock speed of a processor is in the 3.3GHz range.

Evolution of Intel Processors

Table 1.1: Evolution of Intel Processors

From	Procs	Specifications	New Features
2000	Pentium IV	1.4-3GHz, 55M transistors	hyper-pipelining, SMT
2006	Xeon	64-bit, 2GHz, 167M transistors, 4MB L2 cache on chip	Dual core, virtualization support
2007	Core 2 Allendale	1.8-2.6 GHz, 167M transistors, 2MB L2 cache	2 CPUs on one die, Trusted Execution Technology
2008	Xeon	2.5-2.83 GHz, 820M transistors, 6MB L3 cache
2009	Core i7 Lynnfield	2.66-2.93 GHz, 774M transistors, 8MB L3 cache	2-channel DDR3
2010	Core i7 Gulftown	3.2 GHz, 1.17B transistors	One of the new 32 nm processors
2011	Core i7 Sandy Bridge E	3.2-3.3 GHz, 32 KB L1 cache per core, 256 KB L2 cache, 20 MB L3 cache, 2.27B transistors	Up to 8 cores

Cores

The amount of cores on a chip has continued to increase since 2006. By 2011, Intel and IBM were producing 8-core processors. For servers, AMD was producing up to 16-core processors.

Cluster Computers

The '90s saw a rise of cluster computers, or distributed super computers. This movement has continued to the present, and in 2011 the fastest super computer was Japan's K Computer, a cluster computer.

The K computer contains 88,128 nodes and can perform 10.51 petaflops, making it 4 times as fast as the previous record holder. It does this at a computing efficiency of 93%.

One of the newer innovations in cluster computers is high-availability. These types of clusters operate with redundant nodes to minimize downtime when components fail. Such a system uses automated load-balancing algorithms to route traffic when a node fails.

Chip Multi-Processors

As the diminishing returns and power inefficiencies of ILP progressed, manufacturers began to turn towards chip multi-processors (i.e. multicore architectures).

Sources

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
2. http://ark.intel.com/products/52220/Intel-Core-i3-2310M-Processor-%283M-Cache-2_10-GHz%29
3. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ivy-bridge-22nm-cpu-3d-transistor,14093.html
4. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5091/intel-core-i7-3960x-sandy-bridge-e-review-keeping-the-high-end-alive
5. http://www.chiplist.com/Intel_Core_2_Duo_E4xxx_series_processor_Allendale/tree3f-subsection--2249-/
6. http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel-Lynnfield-Core-i7-870-and-Core-i5-750-Processor-Review
7. http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm#Xeon
8. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-980x-gulftown,2573-2.html
9. http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2011/20111102-02.html
10. http://ark.intel.com/products/61275