Wanna race? throttle up with AMD's Opteron, Intel's Banias and IBM's 64-bit desktop MPU - Microprocessor Forum 2002

Electronic News, Oct 21, 2002 by Tom Murphy

In the end, it was all about speed--lots of it.

The drivers, ranging from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to Intel to IBM, gave attendees at last week's Microprocessor Forum (MPF) a look under the hood of their hardware. AMD shared new information about its Opteron processor; Intel shared new details about its Banias; and IBM for the first time took the covers off its forthcoming 64-bit PowerPC chip for desktops.

Fred Weber, VP and CTO of AMD's computation products group, zeroed in on rival Intel's Xeon processors. "You don't need a different instruction set architecture for each market," he said, swiping at Intel's x86 line and its separate ISA for Itanium 2, known as EPIC. "Maintaining existing instruction sets is about compatibility, not performance."

AMD's Opteron processors, set to debut in the first half of 2003, are based on AMD's Hammer processor core, which extends the 32-bit x86 architecture to 64 bits and maintains backward compatibility. System configurability will be key to AMD's success as it enters the server market. The Opteron chip's high-bandwidth HyperTransport links allow multiprocessors to talk to each other in a daisy-chain fashion as well as a cross-fire fashion, Weber said.

Because of Opteron's integrated memory controller, multiprocessor systems can be configured without glue logic. As a result, memory access for each of the processors is greatly enhanced compared to Xeon processors, Weber said.

Meanwhile, Intel is attempting to get under Transmeta's skin with Banias, its new mobile processor design, according to Tom Halfhill, analyst for InStat/MDR, the research firm that sponsors MPF. (Instat/MDR is owned by Reed Business Information, the parent company of Electronic News).

Mooly Eden, director of Intel's Israel-based Mobile Platform Group, said the Banias processor is designed to work in concert with low-voltage chipsets, cache memory and WLAN chips to save on battery power.

In the past, Intel has performed a few process tweaks to its desktop processors to produce a mobile computer part. Banias is different. The chip is Intel's answer to the power-saving features offered by Transmeta's Crusoe processors.

Some of the highlights that Eden outlined include a new branch-prediction design that aims to keep Banias' pipelines full and active, avoiding wasted clock cycles. The chip also includes enhanced Intel SpeedStep technology, which scales down the voltage of the processor when peak performance is not needed. Eden also talked about Mobile Voltage Positioning IV, another power-saving feature, and the company's power-optimized cache memory. By designing an entire system for low-voltage operation, Intel is positioning its chips more toward notebooks that operate for up to eight hours on a single battery charge.

IBM's PowerPC 970 is not the first 64-bit processor designed for desktops. IBM shipped the RS64 in 1997 and the 64-bit AS/400 processor was modified to fit the PowerPC architecture. And another 64-bit PowerPC 620 chip from Motorola was shipped in 1998. Both chips flopped, Halfhill said.

But the new chips seem to be more compelling, judging by the crowd's reaction at MPF. IBM is introducing a sleeker design and is marketing its Power 4 chips for the enterprise server market. PowerPC chips are designed with one CPU core, while the Power 4 has two. And the chips are backward compatible to 32-bit computing. The chips have what Apple Computer Inc. calls a velocity engine, Halfhill said, although Apple has not yet said whether it is developing a 64-bit desktop based on the PowerPC 970.

Motorola Inc. used the forum to disclose details on the latest edition of its ColdFire embedded processor line. Based on the M68000 line, the ColdFire Version 5 is a 32-bit superscalar core that can execute two instructions per machine cycle, according to Joe Circello, chief architect of Motorola's ColdFire Technology Center. That translates into a measurable jump in performance over Version 4, Circello said, as the latest processor can deliver 610 MIPS at 333MHz. ColdFire processors have been used in a variety of applications, ranging from printers to digital audio to industrial control and even NASA's remote camera at the North Pole, Circello said. ColdFire is operating off an installed base of 57 million units, he said.

Meanwhile, Broadcom Corp. introduced its quad-core BCM1400, designed for such applications as the network edge, intelligent routers, virtual private networks and quality-of-service routers, among others, said Barton Sano, senior principal scientist at Broadcom's broadband processor business unit. The chip integrates a number of communications peripherals on-board, Sano said, which will make system designers' lives easier. All that's needed for most systems is the BCM1400 and DRAM. The chip is capable of aggressive packet processing and deep-packet inspection close to wire speeds, Sano said, and is also able to process 20 million packets per second.

Sandbridge Technologies was the only startup at this year's forum. The company is marketing a reconfigurable baseband processor for wireless terminals, said David Malek, the company's marketing manager. As OEMs pack more features into cell phones, there is a need to have a baseband processor that accommodates each of the system's growing amounts of functions and protocols such as GSM, CDMA, WiLAN, Bluetooth, GPS and others, Malek said.