Peter Principle

New Nvidia Chip Steps Closer to Supercomputing in the PC

A new breed of consumer-oriented graphics chips have roughly the brute computing processing power of the world’s fastest computing system of just seven years ago.

Companies have said that the line between such chips and conventional microprocessors is beginning to blur. For example, the new Nvidia chip will handle physics computations that are performed by Sony’s Cell microprocessor in the company’s forthcoming PlayStation 3 console. The new Nvidia chip will have 128 processors intended for specific functions, including displaying high-resolution video.

That convergence was emphasized earlier this year when an annual competition sponsored by Microsoft’s research labs to determine the fastest sorting algorithm was won this year by a team that used a G.P.U. instead of a traditional microprocessor.

Silicon Valley is known for “noble failures” – those companies that aim for the stars, run out of fuel, and end up as large smoking craters in the ground. Take Transmeta – please! A year and a half after they stopped making chips, Transmeta is suing Intel for violating its low-power patents.

One of the patents in the suit covers “adaptive power control,” which changes the speed of a microprocessor on the fly to adapt to usage and power needs. Transmeta applied for that patent in January 2000 and received it in August, said John O’Hara Horsley, general counsel for Transmeta. He said Intel’s SpeedStep technology, which throttles back a computer’s performance to conserve power, appears to violate the Transmeta patent. Under patent law, the filing date for a patent application determines who came up with an invention first.

Transmeta says that Intel’s Pentium III, Pentium 4, Pentium M, Core and Core 2 products infringe on Transmeta’s patents. The complaint asks for an injunction against Intel’s continuing sales of infringing products as well as monetary damages, royalties, treble damages and attorneys’ fees.

Right. Good luck to Transmeta on that one. I’m sure they have nothing to fear from Intel’s legal team.

I.B.M. to Build Supercomputer Powered by Video Game Chips

The Department of Energy said Wednesday that it had awarded I.B.M. a contract to build a supercomputer capable of 1,000 trillion calculations a second, using an array of 16,000 Cell processor chips that I.B.M. designed for the coming PlayStation 3 video game machine.
The Roadrunner will use the Sony Cell Broadband Engine as a specialized processor, with a corresponding array of Advanced Micro Devices Opteron microprocessors. This kind of hybrid design is increasingly being used as designers scramble to reach ever-greater computing speeds.

According to an interview in Electronic News, manufacturing yields for the IBM / Sony Cell processor might be as low as 10 to 20 percent.

With standard silicon germanium (SiGe) single-core processors, IBM can achieve yields of up to 95%, [IBM VP Tom Reeves] told Electronic News. But “with a chip like the Cell processor,” he then remarked, “you’re lucky to get 10 or 20 percent.”

He implied that because the Cell uses as many as eight identical synergistic processing elements (SPEs), but Sony only requires the use of seven, some production units could, in fact, get away with one core in eight being defective without any impact on the customer.