ISSCC: Home cooking at the wafer bakers

The semi-annual dance of chip technology previews gets its 2010 start at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco two weeks from now, and Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, Sun Microsystems (soon to be a division of Oracle), and Hitachi are going to be talking up their future chip tech.

Intel's chip geeks will be showing off the company's "Westmere" family of 32 nanometer processors, which already made their debut earlier this month inside desktop and laptop machines and which are expected to come out for servers within the next couple of months. The details on the session being hosted by Intel at ISSCC are pretty skinny, as you can see from the advanced program. But the word on the street is that Intel will be showing off improvements to the QuickPath Interconnect and low-voltage DDR3 buffers added with the Westmere tweaks.

Intel is showing off another chip which is sure to raise some eyebrows. The company's chip design teams in the United States, India, and Germany have cooked up a 48-core, 32-bit x86 chip implemented in 45 nanometers. This chip, which implements a 2D mesh network in a six-by-four core array, uses message passing across a 384 KB on-die shared memory and also sports fine-grained power management through a feature called dynamic variable frequency scaling (DVFS), which allows individual cores to run at eight different voltages and 28 different frequencies. In the performance range Intel has set up for the chip, power dissipation for this baby x86 supercomputer cluster on a chip (well, that is essentially what it is) ranges from 25 to 125 watts.

Intel will also be discussing a streaming circuit switch, suitable for linking computing elements on a chip in an 8-by-8 2D mesh together, that is also implemented in 45 nanometers and that provides 4.1 Tb/sec bisections and 560 Gb/sec of aggregate bandwidth. This mesh network was cooked up in Intel's Hillsboro, Oregon, facility. This mesh network burns 4.73 watts at 1.1 volts and the network links can apparently be pushed up to 6.43 Tb/sec. No word on how this mesh network will be used by Intel.

Rival AMD will be showing off a new core design implemented in 32 nanometers using silicon-on insulator processes. This core, says the ISSCC abstract, will have more than 35 million transistors (excluding its L2 cache memories) and will crank its clocks up beyond 3 GHz. The AMD chip will have a power dissipation range of between 2.5 and 25 watts, including a zero-power gated state, and will be aimed at desktop and mobile computers. This core is very likely the one that will be launched in the Fusion family of processors, which will pack CPUs and GPUs on the same piece of silicon. (See El Reg's review of the AMD desktop and mobile roadmaps here.)

The engineers and designers from Sun will be showing off the future "Rainbow Falls" Sparc T series processor, a 16 core, 128-thread chip that will have six clock and four voltage settings to offer its own brand of fine-grained power management. The Rainbow Falls chip, which is due around the middle of this year for servers with one, two, and four sockets according to a Sun roadmap from June 2009 obtained by El Reg, will have a glueless means of connecting multiple chips together. The Rainbow Falls chip will be implemented in a 40 nanometer process, presumably by Texas Instruments, Sun's outgoing fab partner, and has an on-chip 6 MB L2 cache shared by the cores that sports 461 GB/sec and an on-chip SerDes I/O processor with 2.4 Tb/sec of bandwidth.