明年中旬，ibm将发布power 6, 5G主频，7亿5千万晶体管

CHOSiN

BM flexing its server chip muscle\r\nSuperfast processor engineered in Austin to get showing at conference; experts say it will keep company out front.\r\nBy Kirk Ladendorf\r\n\r\nAMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF\r\n\r\n\r\nTuesday, October 10, 2006\r\n\r\nIBM Corp.\'s next high-performance processor, known as Power6, won\'t be showing up in the company\'s Unix server systems until mid-2007. \r\n\r\nBut Big Blue will offer a sneak preview of its capabilities today at a technical conference in California. \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n(enlarge photo)\r\nBrad McCredie Chief architect\'s team is credited with figuring out how to improve the speed of the chips.\r\n\r\n\r\nMOST POPULAR STORIES\r\nBaylor\'s Wilson forecasts \'The I-35 Surprise\' \r\nLidle, 2nd Person Die in NYC Plane Crash \r\nBevo XIII, the longest-serving mascot, moves on to greener pastures \r\nCouple crash plane in Southwest Travis County neighborhood \r\nNew \"Austin City Limits\" home will have 1,000 seats, year-round performances \r\n\r\nThe Austin-engineered chip will be massively complex, with 750 million microscopic transistors. And it will be race-car fast, running at about 5 gigahertz, about twice as fast as competing server chips. \r\n\r\nAnalysts say that IBM is well ahead in the race for high-performance server technology and that the Power6 chip will simply increase its lead. Its predecessor, Power5, ran at about 2 gigahertz when it was launched in 2004. (The speed of server processors generally lags those of PC chips because they are designed and used differently.) \r\n\r\n\"IBM is raising the ante for everybody,\" said Charles King of Pund-IT Research in Hayward, Calif. \r\n\r\nFor Brad McCredie, the chip\'s chief architect, today\'s discussion at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, Calif., gives him and IBM the chance to show part of what his team accomplished to an audience of other top chip engineers. McCredie is an IBM Fellow, the company\'s highest technical honor. \r\n\r\n\"This is the largest unveiling of our new baby,\" McCredie said. \"We will impress people. Nobody else in the industry is doubling the frequency (speed).\" \r\n\r\nIn fact, other chip companies, including Intel Corp., have backed off their quest for huge boosts in operating speed because their chips were consuming too much power and creating too much heat. \r\n\r\nIBM says it has navigated that problem with a commitment to power conservation that includes varying the voltages used in certain parts of the chip and being able to turn idle sections of the chip on and off in less than the blink of an eye. \r\n\r\nMuch of the work was done by a few hundred engineers at Building 45 on IBM\'s North Austin campus. \r\n\r\nThe chip will be made with an advanced manufacturing process that produces silicon with elements that are as small as 65 nanometers, about 1/800th the thickness of a human hair. The process will create faster transistors that speed up the chip. \r\n\r\nBut much of the credit for the speed boost goes to McCredie\'s team, which worked hard to smooth the design of thousands of \"critical timing paths\" that enable software instructions to be executed in the right sequence inside the chip, boosting efficiency. Those timing paths had to be worked on, one by one, by many of the engineers on the project. \r\n\r\n\"You take your team and assign those paths and work your way down,\" McCredie said. \"It is hard to get there. All fronts have to be attacked. There were several points where we were stuck on things.\" \r\n\r\nBut they didn\'t stay stuck. Ironing out the engineering details in an advanced chip design \"is really hard work,\" McCredie said. \"But we had fun doing it.\" \r\n\r\nDuring the four to five years it took to develop the chip, the team became a close-knit unit. \r\n\r\nMcCredie, 42, and several members of his team are avid players of ultimate Frisbee during breaks at work. The game, a sort of Frisbee version of football, involves focus, precise execution and timing, as does chip design. Team members celebrated milestones in the project with several beer blasts, some of them at McCredie\'s house. \r\n\r\nTheir accomplishments are worthy of attention, analysts say. \r\n\r\n\"ower6, from all appearanc- es, will blow away the competition when it\'s introduced next year,\" King said. \r\n\r\nApart from its speed, the Power6 chip is designed to be at the center of a server that is awesomely efficient. IBM\'s Unix servers can sell for as little as $3,000, but prices can extend into the millions for the largest models. \r\n\r\nMcCredie said IBM\'s systems based on the new chip will be able to divide into hundreds of \"virtual\" machines operating on different software programs at the same time. That means customers can use one server to handle multiple tasks instead of buying multiple servers. That level of virtualization, he said, will lead the industry. \r\n\r\nMcCredie\'s team also improved the chip\'s ability to handle financial calculations, converting them to decimal points without resorting to time-consuming software steps, which is the normal procedure. That approach, which was requested by some of IBM\'s big corporate customers, makes financial calculations four to seven times as fast on some software tests, McCredie said. \r\n\r\n\"A tremendous volume of the world\'s databases involve decimal-point calculations,\" McCredie said. IBM, after working closely with industry-standards bodies, came up with a way to do the job with hardware instructions. \"It is very hard to translate a conversation with customers into transistors,\" he said. \"But we have to do our best to hear where their pain points are.\"

piner

看了相关文章，强的\r\n可以处理0-9十进制，不仅仅是0,1二进制了，呵呵\r\n\r\n主频5G

still_water

这对于一款时钟频率高达5GHz的处理器而言似乎并没有什么特别的，但Power6能够使用十进制数字0-9，而不是传统计算机通常使用的二进制数字0、1进行数学运算。\r\n\r\nPower6首席设计师布拉德在接受采访时说，当芯片进行乘法运算时，与我们在小学学习的一模一样。本周二，布拉德在“秋季处理器论坛”上披露了Power6的详细资料。\r\n\r\n布拉德表示，二进制是Power6的普通模式，但人们更喜欢十进制，在商业数据库中存储的半数以上的数字信息也是十进制的。但是，当计算机将十进制转换成二进制进行计算，然后才将计算结果转换成十进制时，就会出现计算精度问题。\r\n\r\n他说，有许多软件可以进行十进制数学运算，但在芯片进行十进制运算可以将性能提高2-7倍。但是，十进制计算的速度仍然低于二进制，芯片在一个时钟周期内无法完成更多的工作。