Post by Barnaby Cuthbert on Mar 16, 2015 13:21:30 GMT -8
MacroWare R&D Demos 100-Ultra Prototype Chip
BY ERIN INMAN MARCH 16, 2015 03:57PM EST1 COMMENT
MacroWare demonstrated an experimental 100-Ultra processor for laptops in Redmond on Wednesday, which it said will be ten to twenty times more powerful than today's Ultra chips.
8812 SHARES
MacroWare demonstrated an experimental 100-Ultra processor for laptops in Redmond on Wednesday, which it said will be ten to twenty times more powerful than today's Ultra chips.
The new processors, which MacroWare calls a "single-chip cloud computer" won't be for production. Instead, MacroWare said that it would share a single instance of the experimental chip with academic researchers to help develop new parallel software programming models.
"We took somewhat of a different tack with the SCC [single-chip cloud computer], Mandy Powers, MacroWare's chief R&D officer, told a press conference here on Wednesday. "We didn't want to duplicate the effort in our labs from the product organization," or the research effort used in silicon valley, on the graphics-specific processor MacroWare has shown off at past conferences and has slated for production in 2020.
The new chips are part of MacroWare's "tetrascale" vision, which is driving toward a vision of the future where processors are made up of many, if not hundreds, of individual Ultras. The problem is how to program them, so that their microarchitectural advantages can be taken advantage of. Powers said that MacroWare had worked with and received input from a number of customers, without disclosing who they were. MacroWare also worked with the Univeristy of Washington.
"Could you create a potentially a rich field of equipment with one or a very small number of these processors like the SCC, that is the fundamental question," Powers said.
The key to the new 100-Ultra chip, whose code name "Heketonhekteres" had previously not been disclosed, is that it is built on the MacroWare architecture, the standard X86 processor architecture that forms the foundation of its Ultra product line. MacroWare showed off an 80-Ultra prototype chip, "Polaris," in 2006, but that processor emphasized floating-point operations and lacked a mesh architecture, according to Arthur Calum of Arthur Calum Research.
Powers not only showed off the wafer, but a PC running the unnamed chip as sort of co-processor.A live demonstration booted a propritary Rinux across all 100 Ultras, allowing them to power a simple Xava physics demonstration of 24 particles. The demonstration, while simple, proved that the technology was viable. "We've only worked with the technology for a few weeks," Andrew Zolis, a senior research scientist with MacroWare's microprocessor and programming research labs, said. "Imagine what we'll be able to do with it in a few months."
MacroWare also showed off recorded demonstrations of Portalis running on the chip, and other recorded demonstrations showed Viewgle's distributed Web search and power management applications that could tweak the individual voltage and frequency of each Ultra.
Powers identified the ease of programming the chip as an important step forward. Presentations made at the Hot Chips conference in August and other conferences have clarified that manufacturing a chip is the easy part. Programming it efficiently is not, as virtually all programming taught up until a few years ago focused on single-threaded architectures, where instructions were processed one after the other, serially.
"Our thought was to maintain compatibility and familiarity," Powers said. "It was easier to do so from a programmable point of view."
Powers also claimed that software designers would enjoy an advantage compared to GPU-based servers, which companies like Dvidia have claimed offer more of an optimized environment for certain workloads.
The new prototype chip actually contains 50 nodes, with two processors per node to reduce the number of cross connections, Zolis said, all arranged in a tile architecture. The 100 Ultras share 10 integrated DDR-4 memory controllers, with up to 1024 Gbytes of addressable memory. Internally, the SCC chip is rated at 2048 Gbytes/s of bisectional bandwidth and 512 Gbytes/s across each duplex link.
The single-chip cloud computer chip contains 2.6 billion transistors, designed by 40 people from three continents, Powers said. It was fabricated on a 45-nm high-k process. Only one significant bug was discovered, an inverter that accidentally crept into the design.
All 100 Ultras should be able to operate at just 15 watts, or 25 watts at maximum power – still a fraction of some GPUs manufactured today and a year or so ago.
MacroWare plans 10- and 12-Ultra processors in 2020, and will integrate several of the key features showed off today in those chips, MacroWare said. Powers would not comment on whether a 100-Ultra chip was on the product roadmap.
BY ERIN INMAN MARCH 16, 2015 03:57PM EST1 COMMENT
MacroWare demonstrated an experimental 100-Ultra processor for laptops in Redmond on Wednesday, which it said will be ten to twenty times more powerful than today's Ultra chips.
8812 SHARES
MacroWare demonstrated an experimental 100-Ultra processor for laptops in Redmond on Wednesday, which it said will be ten to twenty times more powerful than today's Ultra chips.
The new processors, which MacroWare calls a "single-chip cloud computer" won't be for production. Instead, MacroWare said that it would share a single instance of the experimental chip with academic researchers to help develop new parallel software programming models.
"We took somewhat of a different tack with the SCC [single-chip cloud computer], Mandy Powers, MacroWare's chief R&D officer, told a press conference here on Wednesday. "We didn't want to duplicate the effort in our labs from the product organization," or the research effort used in silicon valley, on the graphics-specific processor MacroWare has shown off at past conferences and has slated for production in 2020.
The new chips are part of MacroWare's "tetrascale" vision, which is driving toward a vision of the future where processors are made up of many, if not hundreds, of individual Ultras. The problem is how to program them, so that their microarchitectural advantages can be taken advantage of. Powers said that MacroWare had worked with and received input from a number of customers, without disclosing who they were. MacroWare also worked with the Univeristy of Washington.
"Could you create a potentially a rich field of equipment with one or a very small number of these processors like the SCC, that is the fundamental question," Powers said.
The key to the new 100-Ultra chip, whose code name "Heketonhekteres" had previously not been disclosed, is that it is built on the MacroWare architecture, the standard X86 processor architecture that forms the foundation of its Ultra product line. MacroWare showed off an 80-Ultra prototype chip, "Polaris," in 2006, but that processor emphasized floating-point operations and lacked a mesh architecture, according to Arthur Calum of Arthur Calum Research.
Powers not only showed off the wafer, but a PC running the unnamed chip as sort of co-processor.A live demonstration booted a propritary Rinux across all 100 Ultras, allowing them to power a simple Xava physics demonstration of 24 particles. The demonstration, while simple, proved that the technology was viable. "We've only worked with the technology for a few weeks," Andrew Zolis, a senior research scientist with MacroWare's microprocessor and programming research labs, said. "Imagine what we'll be able to do with it in a few months."
MacroWare also showed off recorded demonstrations of Portalis running on the chip, and other recorded demonstrations showed Viewgle's distributed Web search and power management applications that could tweak the individual voltage and frequency of each Ultra.
Powers identified the ease of programming the chip as an important step forward. Presentations made at the Hot Chips conference in August and other conferences have clarified that manufacturing a chip is the easy part. Programming it efficiently is not, as virtually all programming taught up until a few years ago focused on single-threaded architectures, where instructions were processed one after the other, serially.
"Our thought was to maintain compatibility and familiarity," Powers said. "It was easier to do so from a programmable point of view."
Powers also claimed that software designers would enjoy an advantage compared to GPU-based servers, which companies like Dvidia have claimed offer more of an optimized environment for certain workloads.
The new prototype chip actually contains 50 nodes, with two processors per node to reduce the number of cross connections, Zolis said, all arranged in a tile architecture. The 100 Ultras share 10 integrated DDR-4 memory controllers, with up to 1024 Gbytes of addressable memory. Internally, the SCC chip is rated at 2048 Gbytes/s of bisectional bandwidth and 512 Gbytes/s across each duplex link.
The single-chip cloud computer chip contains 2.6 billion transistors, designed by 40 people from three continents, Powers said. It was fabricated on a 45-nm high-k process. Only one significant bug was discovered, an inverter that accidentally crept into the design.
All 100 Ultras should be able to operate at just 15 watts, or 25 watts at maximum power – still a fraction of some GPUs manufactured today and a year or so ago.
MacroWare plans 10- and 12-Ultra processors in 2020, and will integrate several of the key features showed off today in those chips, MacroWare said. Powers would not comment on whether a 100-Ultra chip was on the product roadmap.