Microprocessor Anniversary
Exactly one year ago we came out with a ground-breaking announcement: Sun Microsystems Introduces Breakthrough UltraSPARC T1 Processor with CoolThreads Technology, Setting a New Industry Standard for Performance, Innovation.
I want this blog to be understood as a glossary. I discovered a blog being a prefect place to collect and share information. Inspired through Dan Berg's technology session in Prague I surfed the web to better understand key words of microprocessor technology. During my time with Advanced Micro Devices I developed some passion around this and since did not get back to some more detailed understanding of where the technology in this area was heading. I hope to have put everything in the right context – as you may know, I am not a techie just working in Human Resources!
Let's start with citing a paragraph out of a whitepaper found on Sun's page for Throughput Computing:
“ ....the disparity between processor speeds and memory access speeds means that memory latency dominates application performance, erasing even very impressive gains in clock rates. While processor speeds continue to double every two years, memory speeds have typically doubled only every six years. This growing disconnect is the result of memory suppliers focusing on density and cost as their design center, rather than speed. Unfortunately, this relative gap between processor and memory speeds leaves ultra-fast processors idle as much as 85 percent of the time, waiting for memory to return required data. Ironically, as traditional processor execution pipelines get faster and more complex, the effect of memory latency grows—fast, expensive processors spend more cycles doing nothing. Worse still, idle processors continue to draw power and generate heat. Its easy to see that frequency (gigahertz) is truly a misleading indicator of real performance.”
This is the problem statement, now how did Sun get it's processors achieve more throughput, say work faster and consume less power? Sounds so simple: by Chip Multithreading (CMT):
“ Unlike complex single-threaded processors, CMT processors utilize the available transistor budget to implement multiple hardware multithreading processor cores on a single silicon wafer or chip. Because these individual processor cores implement much simpler pipelines (emphasizing thread-level parallelism or TLP over instruction level parallelism or ILP), they are also substantially cooler and require significantly less electrical energy to operate. This innovative approach results in CoolThreads processor technology—multiple physical instruction execution pipelines (one for each core), with several active thread contexts per pipeline or core.”
Sun's T1 processor code named Niagara possesses 8 cores or in other words 8 different microprocessors on a single chip or die produced with advanced production technology using 90 nanometer structures (this year it has come down as far as 65 nanometers). Each core is able to process 4 threads in parallel, therefor we talk about 32 systems on one chip.
It is not for nothing that we are on top of the industry with our current systems and more to come! When I look at our innovations I really feel good about the future of Sun. As an example, Robert Drost's invention of Proximity I/O or also known under the term Proximity Communications. Simply speaking if you put two microprocessors backside up close to one another, they communicate via wireless signals, with result of higher speeds and less energy consumption. Really great to have so many bright guys on board!
And what is additionally cool: we opensource even our processor architectures (not only our software!) on openSparc. This makes it easy for other companies to build software and hardware around our systems!
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Posted at
12:35PM Nov 14, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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