Industry Trends
"Rock bottom" (Silicone/Carbon)
Trend of a transistor size, current production specs and future plans.
Platter size, silicone real estate and CPU footprint
"The silicone is dead. Again." (the latest breakthroughs in silicone transistor size/speed)
The Future is here: Carbon nanotubes
Longer, Wider, Deeper and Smarter:
Longer pipelines (Intel Netburst)
Wider internal buses, more logical units
- (AMD K8, Intel Core 2, SSE1/2/3/4)
Deeper caches
- (L3 caches, smart prefetch and so on)
"Smarter" CPUs
- Itanium
- AMD Opteron
- (built-in memory controller and bus logic)
- Intel P4
- (complex branch prediction)
"My dual quad-core with quad-SLI"
Intel Hyperthreading and Core 2 Duo/Quad
AMD X2, Quadcore
Sun Niagara
- 4 threads per core
- 4 cores per CPU,
- multiple CPUs per box
IBM Cell
"Personal Petaflop": The Latest in GPU world
- ATI Radeon
- NVidia GeForce
Buses and memory
Parallel Buses
Serial Buses
- Future:
- PCI-E
- AMD HyperTransport
- Intel EV?
Memory
http://www.amd.com
http://www.intel.com