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 logic density is still increasing, number of CPUs per machine is rising, memory size and bandwidth are growing. 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. Ready availability of such technologies, in turn, has fed the hi-end portion of the market and most of the commodity parts are preferred choice for the state-of-the art computer building. While general direction is still the same, it is important to note some of the technological advances that can potentially set new direction for the next generation of the computers.
"Rock bottom" (Silicone/Carbon)
Trend of a transistor size, current production specs and future plans.
The very basic building block of electronic technology, the transistor, has shrank dramatically during the past decade. Processors built on 45nm technology are widly available on the market. According to Intel's press release from the beginning of this year, "Just a decade ago, the state-of-the-art process technology was 250nm, meaning transistor dimensions were approximately 5.5 times the size and 30 times the area of the technology announced today by Intel." [1] Here, on the image below you can see a 45nm 6-transistor SRAM cell, developed by Intel. http://download.intel.com/pressroom/images/manufacturing/45nm_SRAM_Cell.jpg
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