Processor vs Iron

195 Views Thu, 15 Mar 2007 at 05:46 pm

The “power wall” problem is one of the main issues in research for next generation chip architecture. This problem is best described by the following figure.

Power Density of Processors

Most (if not all) of the processors commonly used today are much hotter than the typical steam iron . In fact with the current growth, it is predicted that soon the power density will reach the level within the nuclear reactor . In the late 80’s, the shift to CMOS technologies (from bipolar) are the answer for this power density problem (notice the drop around 90’s in the figure above). For today’s problem, there have been no clear answer. The multicore/multiprocessor approach which offers more efficient performance/watt ratio is promoted to be one of the possible solutions.

The picture is taken from Lecture 2: Introduction to Cell Processor (Dr. Michael Perrone, IBM) page 8, part of the 6.189 Multicore Programming Primer course in MIT (the whole very excellent lecture materials are available online). Originally, I got the link to the course from the Multiprocessor Report blog.

This entry was posted in category: research.