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| Technology News - updated 2:15 PM ET Dec 13 |
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By Ken Popovich, eWEEK Seeking to feed a perceived need for speed, Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news) and IBM this week touted advances that will result in more powerful processors capable of reaching speeds of 10GHz and beyond. At the International Electronic Device Manufacturers show in San Francisco this week, Intel announced its success in producing smaller transistors to fuel faster processors, while IBM showed off new material it is adding to chips to increase processor speed.
But the revved up chips may end up being throttled by more sluggish components within computer systems. In general, while processors have scaled up rapidly in performance year after year, the same hasn't held true for the other components within a computer, most notably the hard drive, the system bus that moves data in and out of processors, and memory chips. "It's a multidimensional problem," said Russ Lange, IBM fellow and chief technologist. "Is the gap growing between the performance of processors and other computer components? Yes." A recent review of advances in system performance compiled by analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64 confirms the problem. Starting with the original IBM PC in 1981 and running up to a current IBM system featuring a 1.5GHz Pentium 4, Brookwood's research showed that processor performance increased 35 percent a year on average. However, system bus speeds improved only 25 percent annually, while DRAM performance rose a relatively sluggish 12 percent per year. "It's a classic problem," Brookwood said. "If you're a CPU designer, you can't just ignore those trends. You have to do all sorts of things to the processor to make up for the sluggishness of other components." For example, many microprocessors today incorporate a technique called "out-of-order executions." This enables chips to handle instructions in a different order than specified by programs to make up for delays that result when the processor has to wait for data from slower components. Part of the problem stems from the varying priorities of hardware makers. For instance, while chip makers have long sought to boost clock frequencies to process data more quickly, hard-drive manufacturers have focused on increasing the amount of memory that can be stored on a disk rather than on how quickly data can be transferred from that disk to the processor. To avoid the delays that result when the processor pulls too much data from the hard drive, chip makers have been boosting the amount of memory attached to processors. Without such memory reservoirs, Brookwood said, "It's kind of like sending out a messenger to get data and waiting a week for it to come back." Onward and upward Yet, despite the failure of computer components to keep pace, chip makers this week unveiled still more advances to further boost processing power. At the International Electronic Device Manufacturers show, innovations were touted in a variety of high-tech areas. However, recent advances in microprocessor technology by Intel and IBM stole the show. In particular, Intel researchers revealed the company's success in producing extremely small transistors, a key building block inside processors. Specifically, Intel said it had produced transistors that are about 30 nanometers across (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). That's relatively the same size as a single strand of DNA. "These transistors represent a big breakthrough for us, and we believe we're a generation ahead of the competition in this regard," said Rob Willoner, a market analyst within the Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group. In general, smaller transistors work faster than larger ones, and by decreasing their size manufacturers are able to pack more of them onto a single die, creating more powerful processors. Today, Intel's fastest 1.5GHz Pentium 4 features 42 million transistors. Using its new technology, the company expects it can crowd up to 400 million transistors onto a single die, resulting in an approximate tenfold increase in performance. Intel expects to be able to produce microprocessors with speeds approaching 10GHz in 2005. For its part, IBM representatives said their slate of innovations will have a more immediate impact. Rather than shrinking transistors, IBM researchers touted alternative technologies that add new materials to chips in order to boost performance. "There was a technique called scaling that said if you take a transistor and make it twice as small, it will run twice as fast," said IBM's Lange. "We've been following that rule for 20-plus years, but we're finding that as we get devices down to the sizes that we're talking about today, the payoff from making them smaller and smaller is running out. That's why you see us adding other things into the chips." For example, early next year IBM said it will begin selling microprocessors that will for the first time combine three technologies -- copper wiring, SOI (silicon-on-insulator) and an additional insulating material called SiLK. While IBM didn't disclose the clock speeds for the new chips, which are expected to be integrated into high-end servers, it did say they will be built using the 0.13 micron manufacturing process. Currently, most processors, including Intel's Pentium 4, are made using the 0.18 micron manufacturing process. Several chip makers, including Intel, will move to the 0.13 micron process in 2001. The most distinctive features of IBM's new design, known as CMOS 9S, are its use of SOI and SiLK, a new insulation material known as a low-k dielectric. While IBM contends that SOI, which provides insulation for each transistor, can improve processor performance by up to 35 percent, it said that additional insulation provided by SiLK, which the company is adding to chips for the first time, will result in even higher performance. The processor will be able to run at faster speeds without the consequential rise in temperature and cross-talk between the processors. Stepping back from his focus on innovations in microprocessor design, IBM's Lange admitted that faster processors alone won't result in better performing computers and servers. "If you sit down at your desktop and work on your PC, you hear a lot of clicking going on that's probably coming from the hard drive," he said. "That stuff is the true inefficiency in the technology. Understanding not only how to make the frequency [on the chip] run faster, but how to deliver data in and out of the processor, is a system design question, which is actually quite challenging to deal with."
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