3D Processors, Stacking Cores - Intel's Plans for Desktops
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Research labs have always been designing new technologies that are leaps ahead of mainstream ones, but often they don’t evolve into the kind of revolution that arrives on everyone’s desktop. So, the big question a lot of people want to ask about 3D wafer processors is whether they will enter the commercial market. Will I be able to buy a Dell or Compaq with a layered CPU?
Well, Intel is already planning to deliver. The company want to push dual core chip much further, using the three dimensional technology. Intel has announced that they have stopped trying to push more power through their chips and now intend to improve efficiency and design. In their speculations, Intel intends to offer chips with tens or hundreds of cores by 2015. Each core will be designed to handle multiple threads of information, meaning that the processors they intend to make will process hundreds or thousands of times the amount of data that current ones do. The way to provide this efficiency and design? You guessed it, three dimensional architecture.
In Intel’s plans is a design that will put many tiny processing cores all together on one layer. Below each core will be a lower layer that had one designated piece of memory allocated to each one. This would look like many separate two layer processors shoved onto one chip. However, below those layers will be one large layer of memory that is designated as the belonging to the whole processor, and is connected to all the chips. Intel could also add SoC layers.
As part of Intel’s announcement about their future, they claimed that their new drive to cut power consumption could save billions of dollars in energy. This is due in part to stacking processors and keeping interconnects close. It may also indicate that Intel may be shortening their chips’ pipelines.
Of course, Intel is being none too specific about when these technologies will be ripe, but certainly we’ll have to see more software publishers adapt to programming for multiple threads of data before these kinds of advancements do us any good at all. AMD has not yet made any public announcements about developing 3D wafer CPUs, but you can be sure they aren’t sleeping on the job.
Right now, the 3D CPUs that researchers are showcasing use all new software and instruction sets. The ones being constructed do not appear to be x86 compatible. Without that compatibility, replacing current processors will be very difficult. The established consumer chipset, x86, dates back to the 70s. Over the past couple decades, the x86 platform has become too established to simply move over for a competing technology.
Next: The Takeover of 3D Layered CPUs >>
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