Kicking Pat delivered the keynote at the IEEE's International Solid State Circuits conference, which draws over 3,000 semiconducor engineers to San Francisco. The nub of his presentation is this. He acknowledges that Intel has contributed to the general power and thermal issues by sacrificing efficiency for performance in the push for higher frequencies, by designing deeper pipelines, with less gates per pipeline. We make big fat transistors to drive up the frequency. Keeping the die size constant, or maintaining voltage as a constant for future generations of chips are inadequate answers, he says.
Engineers woll have to design their way past thermal issues.
Rotten to the Core There are of course a host of new design approaches the industry can take. Gelsinger says Intel has been checking out multi-threading processors that look like two or more CPUs to software applications. Compaq calls this SMT, or simultaneous multi-threading, and it will appear in EV8 Alphas next year. Such a model adds maybe 10 per cent to the logic on a chip, but adds under 10 per cemt thermal cost, compared to a 2x increase in heat and power for conventional revs, according to Intel estimates cited by Gelsinger. Other approaches are to offload specific computational tasks onto a dedicated integrated DSP or special instruction set, such as SSE2.