CSC/ECE 506 Fall 2007/wiki1 4 JHSL
Architectual Trends
General trends
During the last ten years general direction of the architectural trends did not change much. The only difference is that the most of the yesterday's bleeding-edge technologies have made its way to consumer market and now available for individual users, not just big companies and research centers.
"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
- (explicit parallelism)
- 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
- Past:
- PCI
- PCI-X
- AGP
Serial Buses
- Future:
- PCI-E
- AMD HyperTransport
- Intel EV?
Memory
- [G]DDR2/3/4
- FB-DIMM