The basic design of AMD's forthcoming Griffin processor isn't all that different from its predecessor, according to a company engineer.
Griffin has been billed as AMD's "next-generation" mobile processor, with significant changes designed to make AMD's chip design more suitable for power-sensitive notebook PCs. But those changes are mostly implemented in things like the memory controller; the cores themselves are almost identical, said AMD's Jonathan Owen, speaking at the Hot Chips conference.
AMD's first Turion mobile chips was essentially a power-optimized version of its Opteron server processor. AMD and Intel took different paths with their current chip designs; AMD designed a server chip, and tweaked it for other applications, while Intel designed a notebook chip and tweaked it for other applications.
AMD does fairly well in the notebook market, but it hasn't made nearly as much headway against Intel among the more expensive (read: profitable) notebooks. Griffin is supposed to help change that, but it won't be because of any changes AMD made to the basic core design, Owen said. "Griffin is largely a northbridge project built on an existing processor core design," he said.
The northbridge, which connects the processor to memory, underwent the most radical changes with the Griffin processor. AMD's chips use a northbridge integrated directly onto the processor, unlike Intel's, which use memory controllers outside the chip.
The Griffin memory controller will be more power-friendly because it will run at the speed of the memory, not the speed of the processor, Owen said. It sits on a separate power plane from the processor, which means it runs at a lower voltage and a lower clock speed. The company also built thermal monitors directly onto the Griffin processor that can throttle the chip back to more respectable speeds if things start to get a little hot. That used to be done by a thermal monitor outside the chip.
Griffin notebooks will be available in the middle of next year. Because it's basically the same chip as AMD's current Turion chips, Owen estimated that the clock speeds of Turion and Griffin will be about the same, but with a few ticks up the speed ladder.
On to the networking session at Hot Chips. Previous Hot Chips installments covered the Reed Hundt speech, AMD keynote, wireless networking, technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. Comments are welcome!
After the highly political talk by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, the Networking session pulled us sharply back into ... Read more
PALO ALTO, Calif.--The 2008 Presidential election will determine whether wireless networks will be open or closed, former Federal Communications Chairman Reed Hundt said during a presentation at the Hot Chips conference taking place here at Stanford this week.
The FCC is gearing up for the January auction of the spectrum--the 1GHz and below part of the spectrum--currently dedicated to UHF TV. It's valuable spectrum, Hundt noted. It goes through walls and building. A nationwide network on the spectrum should cost about one-tenth of the cost it would require to build a network for the 2.4GHz spectrum.
"This is the last auction," he said.
In a recent decision, the agency ruled that a valuable portion of the spectrum will be auctioned off with the requirement that it be left open. That is, companies that own the spectrum would have to let anyone with any kind of wireless device to access content on the spectrum. Carriers could not wall off elements from their own customers.
Entertainment services like V Cast from Verizon would not be permitted, according to Hundt.
Still, even though the spectrum will be auctioned off this coming January, some of the regulations regarding open access will terminate in January 2009, right after the election. Thus, he stated that whether or not open access rules are enforced or remain could be determined by who becomes president.
Hundt is not an impartial observer. He is one of the figures behind Frontier Wireless, a company that plans to buy much of the spectrum to be auctioned off. Unlike traditional carriers, however, Frontier will not sell content or service packages to consumers. Instead, it will sell it wholesale to others. Hundt further added that the company is asking the FCC to regulate it so that it can't move into the retail market.
Although Frontier says it is dedicated to helping preserve freedom for the average American, it's backed by several former Netscape execs, venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and other captains of industry.
Analog TV, by the way, won't disappear until February 2009. That wasn't because of the election cycle. The FCC picked it so that it would come between the Super Bowl and the NCAA championship, Hundt said.
The battle over spectrum is akin to the antitrust battle over railroads at the end of the 19th Century. In 1860, 10 percent of the government's property was effectively given to railroads. Twenty years later, railroads were some of the most powerful and profitable businesses in the country.
In modern-day America, communications carriers have experienced a boon through regulations. A significant portion of their market value, Hundt asserted, derived from how government rules help them grow and protect their markets.
Meanwhile, the average American is not enjoying a robust economic life these days, he said.
"Average wages are lower on an inflation adjusted basis than they were in 2001," he said. During the same time, "47 percent of income gain has gone to the top 1 percent in the country," he added.
Traditional carriers have heavily criticized and fought open access regulations.
Yes, I'm still at Hot Chips. This post covers a special presentation by Reed Hundt of Frontline Wireless, who is a former chairman of the FCC. (Michael Kanellos has also blogged about this speech, here.) Previous Hot Chips installments include the AMD keynote, wireless networking, technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. Comments are welcome!
Reed Hundt is best known as a former chairman of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), where his role in enacting the Telecommunications Act of 1996 generated considerable controversy.
He opened his talk by regaling us with ... Read more
This is the seventh in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The previous installments looked at technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!
This session has two presentations--one from SiBeam describing wireless HDTV transmission for home use, the other from Broadcom on new 802.11n Wi-Fi technology.
The SiBeam presentation is easily summarized: It describes a chipset that sends uncompressed HDTV video over ... Read more
This is the sixth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The previous installments looked at process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!
We began Tuesday morning with a session on assorted technology developments.
The first talk was from Sun Microsystems, about the company's Proximity chip-to-chip interconnect technology. Today, to put multiple chips in a package--a common technique in high-end servers, for example--each chip will be individually connected to the package substrate through conductive ... Read more
This is the fifth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!
I'm back for one last session today, a panel discussion on the topic of "What's Next Beyond CMOS?" The question refers to the common processes for making complementary metal-oxide semiconductors.
The panel includes many leading experts in the ... Read more
This is the fourth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!
The first talk in session 3 is from Advanced Micro Devices, describing the ATI Radeon HD 2900. (I checked, and AMD does still use the ATI brand name for some of its products; this is one of them.)
This is another chip I described briefly in one of my Siggraph 2007 pieces (here). The 2900 has 320 cores (which AMD calls "stream ... Read more
Welcome back to the ongoing Speeds and Feeds coverage of Hot Chips 19 at Stanford. They give us comfy chairs and free Wi-Fi, so blogging about it is the least I can do. By the way, Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury News is also blogging from Hot Chips, so you can get another perspective on the event here.
Session 2 is the first of two sessions of "Multi-Core and Parallelism" presentations. This one happens to be all about Nvidia. Session 3, up next, will include presentations about AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900, Intel's 80-core "Tera-Scale" processor, the TRIPS project at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Tile Processor from Tilera.
The first presentation in this session, "The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GPU," is an overview of that chip. As I mentioned in my Siggraph coverage, the 8800 includes 128 ... Read more
(This is the second post in a series written "live" from Hot Chips 19 at Stanford University.)
Vernor Vinge is best known as a science-fiction writer, but he's also a computer scientist; he retired from his professorship at San Diego State University five years ago. (I mentioned his participation in a panel at Siggraph earlier this month here.)
Vinge's talk was titled "Digital Gaia," a reference to the Gaia Hypothesis. (I see Vinge used the same title for a January, 2000 essay in Wired, here.) Vinge described several scenarios for the future of the integrated-circuit industry, building on some ... Read more
