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| Intel’s Silicon Dance |
November 10, 2005 |
By Danny Bradbury
THE CHIP GIANT OUTLINES ITS DUAL-CORE STRATEGY, PROMISING LESS POWER CONSUMPTION AND 64-BIT COMPUTING. SO THINK LOWER ELECTRICITY BILLS AND FASTER BUSINESS SYSTEMS.
“Growth is back.” That phrase was heard all over Intel’s Fall 2005 Developer Forum. The company threw out the expression in a bid to shrug off memories of the dot-com slump, but based on the company’s announcements, a more accurate slogan might have been “less is more” - less power consumption and more performance.
Some conference attendees even suggested “better late than never” given that in many areas Intel is playing catch-up with rival AMD.
Intel, like every other chip company, has been grappling with the limitations of physics for awhile. Manufacturers have traditionally made computer chips work harder by pumping electricity through them at increasing speeds, as measured in hertz. A one gigahertz (GHz) chip moves electricity through its complex fabric of logic and memory gates one thousand million times each second.
As the speed of processors has moved from one gigahertz to two, and to three and above, processor companies also reduced the size of the tiny transistors on each chip to cram more into the same area. These days, companies such as Intel and AMD use 65-nanometre sizes. To get a sense of how small that is, consider that only three polio viruses could be placed on one transistor.
Fighting physics
But at those sizes, the laws of physics begin to create big problems for engineers. Smaller components concentrate more power - and therefore more heat - into a smaller area. Interference is also a problem. Chip designers find it increasingly difficult to prevent electricity moving along one path from interfering with the path next to it.
Consequently, companies have started looking for other ways to improve processor performance. In 2002, Intel released its Hyper-Threading technology, in which it duplicated key parts of the microchip to make one physical chip look like two logical chips. This enabled the company to make extra use of electricity in the chip to process more instructions, but Hyper-Threading only took the company so far. Now, the big move is toward dual-core chips, in which one piece of silicon contains the circuitry for two physical processors.
Intel has produced two chips which sport dual-core designs for server computers, but at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in late August, the company’s CEO Paul Otellini outlined a future built entirely on dual core. The as-yet unnamed systems are the next iteration of the x86 platform that it has been selling for two decades.
Intel will move to dual-core systems across the board, not only in servers (the typical site of these powerhouses) but also in desktop computers and even in laptops.
A better performance-to-power ratio gives the company a chance to reduce power consumption in PCs. Intel previously reduced the power consumption of mobile computers when it unveiled the Centrino platform in 2003, releasing what was essentially a new processor in the form of the Pentium M.
Now it wants to reduce power consumption at the desktop and server levels, too. “We need to think about delivering performance against a new metric - and that’s performance per watt,” Otellini said.
Multi-core enables us to deliver continued performance without the power penalties that we saw in the gigahertz approach.”
The importance of power consumption among desktop computers is not to be underestimated, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at In-Stat research. “If you start running these things over 100 watts you need fans everywhere, and it starts impacting user experience,” he said. “Not to mention your electricity bill.”
Power-supply capacity and simple floor-space limitations in corporate datacentres are problems that denser, lower-voltage chips could help solve. Companies may eventually be able to pack more processing power into a smaller area and draw less electricity.
Powerful rivals
But power consumption, like dual-core processing, is something rivals have been thinking about for some time. AMD, for example, has been selling dual-core versions of its Opteron server and workstation-targeted processor since April. It offers 95-, 55- and 30-watt versions of the Opteron system, said Brent Kirby, product marketing manager for Opteron processors.
Regardless of who was first, low-power and multi-core chips are definitely here to stay. Over the next couple of years, most of Intel’s IA-32 product line will become dual core, which covers all PC chips other than the high-end Itanium line and the ultra-small footprint Xscale processor for PDAs.
Software vendors have been struggling to come to terms with the change in processor architectures, especially at the server level. Charging for software on a per-CPU basis has been a tradition in the computer industry, but what does one do when there are two CPUs on a chip?
There are two approaches. Companies like Microsoft have agreed to charge for one piece of silicon no matter how many processing cores it has. This could conceivably lower the cost of computing if companies can increase application performance by running on more than one core. Oracle, on the other hand, decided earlier this year to charge for its database software on a per-core basis. Oracle’s customers, faced with the prospect of paying twice for the software if they moved to dual core, protested strongly. Eventually, Oracle reached an uneasy compromise, treating each processor core as three quarters of a chip and pricing accordingly.
But as both AMD and Intel move to four-core processors in selected models in 2007, and as the industry looks forward to eight-core and denser processors going forward, many pricing issues are still unresolved.
Ushering in 64
The other big initiative at IDF was the move of almost all Intel’s product line to 64-bit computing. Most modern computers move data around in chunks of 32 bits, so moving to 64 bit increases processing speed. It also means computers can address more memory at once, so when running a large database application, for example, more data can be kept in the computer’s memory, rather than accessing data from hard drives. Again, this delivers faster computing.
Although Intel announced some 64-bit extensions to its mid-range Xeon chip, strictly speaking the only 64-bit processor in the company’s line is the Itanium, its flagship chip for very high-powered computers. But with the new roadmap, even laptop processors will be 64-bit enabled. Again, AMD beat the company to 64-bit computing on x86-based chips, launching the 64-bit Opteron for workstations and servers and the 64-bit Athlon desktop processor in 2003.
SIDEBAR
So what will companies do with all this power?
Virtualization, for one
One of the hottest new technologies in the processor market is virtualization. Companies such as VMWare sell software that creates a virtual layer between the operating system and the processor, enabling companies to run multiple operating systems on the same processor. Soon, both Intel and AMD plan to put virtualization technology directly into the chip itself, meaning the processor will enable different operating systems to be run without interfering with each other’s operations or files.
What does that mean for your company? Employees could have two separate versions of the Windows operating system for home and work, creating a virtual “wall” between the two for security purposes. Support organizations managing computers for customers could remotely switch to a support operating system should a problem with the customer’s system emerge, enabling the techs to carry out operations in an uncompromised environment.
But there are other more contentious ramifications, said Brian Gammage, a vice-president at research company Gartner Group. “They’re doing something that won’t please Microsoft, because they’re effectively disintermediating the operating system instance from the hardware,” he said. “That can have all sorts of ramifications. For example, it would be possible to create multiple virtual machines running on a PC that users could activate.”
It then becomes technically possible for a PC manufacturer to preload multiple operating systems onto the same computer and have them activated at will, Gammage said. Given Apple’s recent decision to use Intel as its processor platform, that creates interesting theoretical possibilities for PC and Macintosh users going forward-and, if events played out, could loosen Microsoft’s grip on the operating system market.
Microsoft declined to comment for this story.
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