hot chips

High-end server chips breaking records

How would you like a single-chip microprocessor with more than four times the performance (on some applications) of Intel's best Core i7?

Then consider that up to 32 of these chips can be directly connected to form a single server, achieving four times the built-in scalability of Intel's next-generation Nehalem-EX processor.

That's IBM's widely anticipated Power7, which it described at last week's Hot Chips conference. But if you're interested, you'd better be prepared to spend a lot more than four times as much per chip. IBM isn't talking about pricing, but large … Read more

OpenCL: Parallel programmers' new best friend

Apple's Snow Leopard operating system, which hits the streets on Friday, has plenty of new technology--but one of its major new features will soon be available on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and other major platforms.

OpenCL, the Open Computing Language, was originally proposed by Apple to support parallel programming on GPUs. There are other GPU programming languages, such as Nvidia's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) extensions for C and the Brook stream program language developed at Stanford University and included in Advanced Micro Devices' Stream Computing software development kit, but rather than choosing one of these languages, Apple chose to create a new standard … Read more

IBM's Power charge continues

IBM's industry analyst meeting last week in Austin, Texas, covered the present and the future of its Power line. This is the system lineup once called the RS/6000 and pSeries into which was more recently folded the iSeries (previously AS/400, System 36, etc.) to form a new family called IBM Power Systems.

For our purposes here I am going to focus on Power in the guise of IBM's RISC-based lineup running a combination of AIX (IBM's flavor of commercial Unix) and Linux (either natively or using PowerVM Lx86 to run x86 Linux applications). IBM i, … Read more

The wraps are coming off IBM's Power7

At Tuesday's Hot Chips conference IBM is scheduled to take the wraps off Power7, its next generation of RISC microprocessor. This is a big deal for IBM because Power is the foundation for its AIX Unix operating system, which has been one of the stars of its server portfolio in recent years. Power also supports the IBM i operating system and can also run Linux either natively or in an x86 binary translation mode that IBM acquired from Transitive. (Transitive is the company that developed the "Rosetta" technology that Apple used for the PowerPC to Intel transition.)… Read more

IBM Power7 hot topic at Hot Chips conference

The Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif this week is focusing on high-end chips for servers and scientific computers, with IBM's upcoming Power7 as a standout.

On Tuesday, IBM will give a presentation on its next-generation server chip, the Power7. IBM documentation describes the chip as having up to eight cores. A dual-chip module holds two processors for a total of 16 cores, according to IBM.

Each core has a rated performance of 32 gigaflops, providing 256 gigaflops per processor--one of the fastest chips to date based on this scientific-centric performance benchmark.

Power7 will be used in the … Read more

Larrabee performance--beyond the sound bite

Hello, Slashdot.

In a story on PC Pro, Nvidia architect John Montrym (whose name was incorrectly spelled "Mottram") quoted my recent blog post on Larrabee as concluding that "the 'large' Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI."

Alas, this isn't really what I said or meant.

What I actually described as equating to "the performance of a 2006-vintage...graphics chip" was a performance standard defined by Intel itself--running the game F.E.A.R. at 60 fps in 1,600 x 1,200-pixel resolution with four-sample antialiasing.

Intel used this figure for some comparisons of rendering performance. If Larrabee ran at 1GHz, for example, Intel's figures show that… Read more

Live from Hot Chips 19: Session 9, Big Iron

Okay, this is it for Hot Chips. Read the whole set of Hot Chips blogs here. Comments? You know what to do...

This final session opens with a presentation by Sun of "Victoria Falls," a multicore server processor due out in 2008. This chip is… Read more

AMD's Griffin core has few changes from older designs

The basic design of AMD's forthcoming Griffin processor isn't all that different from its predecessor, according to a company engineer.

Griffin has been billed as AMD's "next-generation" mobile processor, with significant changes designed to make AMD's chip design more suitable for power-sensitive notebook PCs. But those changes are mostly implemented in things like the memory controller; the cores themselves are almost identical, said AMD's Jonathan Owen, speaking at the Hot Chips conference.

AMD's first Turion mobile chips was essentially a power-optimized version of its Opteron server processor. AMD and Intel took different … Read more