Chapter 1: Nick Nicholls, Albert Chu
Since 2006, parallel computers have continued to evolve. Besides the increasing number of transistors (as predicted by Moore's law), other designs and architectures have increased in prominence. These include Chip Multi-Processors, cluster computing, and mobile processors.
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
| 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 |
Cluster Computers
The '90s saw a rise of cluster computers, or distributed super computers. These systems take advantage of the power of individual processors, and then combine to create a unified, powerful system. Originally, cluster computers only used uniprocessors, but have since adopted the use of multi-processors. 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, while doing it at a computing efficiency of 93%. The processor used at each of these nodes is the SPARC64 VIIIfx.
| Name | Procs | Specifications | New Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| SPARC64 VIIIfx | 2000 | Pentium IV | 1.4-3GHz, 55M transistors |
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
Prior to developing chip multi-processors, instruction level parallelism (ILP) was used. Instruction level parallelism is the act of executing multiple instructions at the same time. Before multi-processors this could be implemented in a single core with the use of pipe-lining.
As the diminishing returns and power inefficiencies of ILP progressed, manufacturers began to turn towards chip multi-processors (i.e. multicore architectures). 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.
| Aspects | Intel Sandy Bridge | AMD Valencia | IBM POWER7 |
|---|---|---|---|
| # Cores | 4 | 8 | 8 |
| Clock Freq. | 3.5GHz | 3.3GHz | 3.55GHz |
| Clock Type | OOO Superscalar | OOO Superscalar | SIMD |
| Caches | 8MB L3 | 8MB L3 | 32MB L3 |
| Chip Power | 95 Watts | 95 Watts | 650 Watts for the whole system |
Mobile Processors
Due to the popularity of smart phones, there has been significant development on mobile processors. This category of processors has been specifically designed for low power use. To conserve power, these types of processors use dynamic frequency scaling. This technology allows the processor to run at varying clock frequencies based on the current load.
| Aspects | Intel Atom N2800 | ARM Cortex-A9 |
|---|---|---|
| # Cores | 2 | 2 |
| Clock Freq | 1.86GHz | 800MHz-2000MHz |
| Cache | 1MB L2 | 4MB L2 |
| Power | 35 W | .5W-1.9W |
Sources
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
- http://ark.intel.com/products/52220/Intel-Core-i3-2310M-Processor-%283M-Cache-2_10-GHz%29
- http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ivy-bridge-22nm-cpu-3d-transistor,14093.html
- http://www.anandtech.com/show/5091/intel-core-i7-3960x-sandy-bridge-e-review-keeping-the-high-end-alive
- http://www.chiplist.com/Intel_Core_2_Duo_E4xxx_series_processor_Allendale/tree3f-subsection--2249-/
- http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel-Lynnfield-Core-i7-870-and-Core-i5-750-Processor-Review
- http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm#Xeon
- http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-980x-gulftown,2573-2.html
- http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2011/20111102-02.html
- http://ark.intel.com/products/61275
- http://www.anandtech.com/show/5096/amd-releases-opteron-4200-valencia-and-6200-interlagos-series
- http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a9.php
- http://ark.intel.com/products/58917/Intel-Atom-Processor-N2800-(1M-Cache-1_86-GHz)