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Making the Move To Multicore


By Lisa L. Morgan
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December 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 7)
There was a time when clock speed and the number of transistors defined the next levels of microprocessor performance. Chip vendors are still increasing the number of transistors on a single chip, but they are no longer trying to double clock speeds every two years because thermal dissipation and power consumption have gotten out of hand.

“Data centers are using too much power, and at the same time servers are underutilized,” said Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions at AMD. “In Manhattan it either costs millions to bring more power in or there is no space to expand. Power, space and cooling are big issues.”

Intel had been increasing the clock speed of its single core (aka unicore) chips by 40 percent per year every two years until the power consumption reached about 100 watts, said Geoff Lowney, fellow in the digital enterprise group and director of compiler and architecture advanced development at Intel. About two years ago, the company decided that the best way to increase power was not to continue to increase frequency but instead to continue to increase the number of transistors on a single chip, utilizing a multicore architecture.

“We could still make unicores run faster, but it wouldn’t be as efficient,” said Lowney. “A 2x increase in speed does not yield a 2x gain in performance; however, if you add four times the transistors using two cores, you get 4x performance.”

Approximately 70 percent of all Intel microprocessors shipped by the end of the year will be dual-core or quad-core. Lewis said 70 percent of AMD’s microprocessors shipped by year’s end will be dual-core with a whopping 90 percent shipping for use in servers, desktops and workstations. AMD will unveil what it calls a “true” quad-core in mid-2007 that will feature four cores on a single piece of silicon. By contrast, Intel’s newly announced quad-core combines two dual-cores in a single package.

Multicore processors operate at lower frequencies than their unicore counterparts and therefore consume less power and dissipate less heat. The thermal dissipation and power consumption benefits are attractive to designers of both embedded and enterprise systems alike.




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