I am here listening to a talk by Mary Jane Irwin, the 2007 Anita Borg Technical Leadership Award winner. She is from Penn State and is discussing "The Multicore Revolution: Challenges and Opportunities." I believe this will be a very good learning experience.
In 1965, Gordon Moore (of Intel) predicted that the number of transistors that can be integrated on a single chip would double about every two years. I had never heard of this law before, but I find it to be very fascinating. She discussed the technology scaling road map by ITRS and 45 nanometer transistors. Thirty million of them can fit on the head of a pin! She also mentioned that processor clock rates have been doubling about every two years. This accounts for the improvements of computers ever few years - this is why we are always buying new ones!
Between 2000 and 2005, chip power has increased 1.6 times. This means new ways have to be discovered to cool chips because the heat flux increases two times. I must admit that a lot of this information is waaaaaaaaay over my head, but I'm still very interested. I've never really learned much about hardware and statistics such as the ones I've mentioned.
A lot of work is going to have be put into this area of research. Product cost pressures demands that chips fit into a limited power budget (around 100 watts/centimeter squared, I believe). Battery life for mobile devices is also impacted. Everyone has to deal with that problem! The cost of powering and cooling servers is also majorly affected. Since it seems everything in the world revolves around money and cost, this is a BIG issue. Google created a solution, however - they have a cold river and cheap power! Intel's shipment of a dual-core processor is a step into the multicore future.
I would like to take an aside and say how amazingly smart this speaker is! I don't think I could ever imagine myself being able to stand in front of a large audience and explain such in-depth, complicated matter. Well, at least it seems very complicated to me! I am in awe of these women who are so deeply rooted in engineering!
Back to the details.. Apparently Intel has a prototype of an 80-core chip which was presented in 2006. Eighty cores? Wow! It's amazing to see how much technology has changed in the last 60-70 years. I can only imagine how much it will change in my lifetime!
I would definitely encourage anyone who is fascinated by this area of study to visit the GHC Wiki and see if the presenter posted her notes. I'm not sure if she did or not, but it's worth finding out!
Brit McCullar
Official GHC 2007 Blogger
You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum. You can find me at britghc2007.blogspot.com.
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