Cube CPUs

Welcome to Cube CPUs – the next paradigm shift in microprocessors. Cube CPUs brings together the advances of 3d computing power – cube cpu articles, cube cpu videos, and general chatter about newer computer chips – including 3d Microprocessors. Here’s what we learned from Ray Kurzweil about future chip designs. Computer microprocessor chips today are flat (although it does require up to 20 layers of material to produce one layer of circuitry).

Our brain, in contrast, is organized in three dimensions. There are many technologies in the wings that build circuitry in three dimensions. Nanotubes, for example, which are already working in laboratories, build circuits from pentagonal arrays of carbon atoms. One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful than the human brain.

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Trends in Cpu Design

Trends in Cpu Design

For the past few years, in the processor field, the trend has been slowly shifting from a single high Hz CPU to multicore processors. Intel has Xeon dual core and has managed to paste two such chips to bring out what it calls quad core, AMD still has only Opteron dual-core CPUs and is likely to release native quad-core chip next year. There are other smaller players like Azul claiming to have much more cores in a CPU but the real players are only four of them, the remaining two being IBM and Sun Microsystems. IBM along with partners worked on designing Cell chip but it is a special-purpose processor, not for general computing. Sun surprised everyone last year with its eight-core Niagara processor also known as UltraSparc T1. It not only had eight cores in a single chip, but has the capability to run 4 simultaneous hardware threads in each of them giving an impression to the OS of running on a 32 CPU machine.

Sun is going to follow it with Niagara 2 which will have twice the number of threads in each core, thus a virtual 64 threads in eight cores! While Niagara has one floating point unit (FPU) shared by all 8 cores thus slowing down the floating point performance, Niagara 2 will have an FPU for each core. It’ll also run with a higher clock rate. So it will be a complete server-on-a-chip when it comes out next year. Seems to be the most interesting processor at present.

More about Niagara 1 at :

Acehardware http://www.aceshardware.com/read_news.jsp?id=80000603

about Niagara 2 :

Official Sun doc: http://www.opensparc.net/publications/presentations/niagara-2-a-highly-threaded-server-on-a-chip.html

and

News.com

http://news.com.com/Suns+Niagara+2+doubles+down+with+twice+the+threads/210-41006_3-6108880.html

Cell processor info at

Offician IBM link : http://www.research.ibm.com/cell

article source : http://osgeek.blogspot.com/2006/12/trends-in-cpu-design_11.html

Quick overview of Wind River hypervisor on Freescale’s P2020 multicore process. Great value prop for network equipment needing dataplane acceleration

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