The semiconductor industry will have to rethink many of
the architectural approaches it has taken to build today's
processors to handle the vast datasets of the future, said Pat
Gelsinger, senior vice president and chief technology officer at
Intel.
Gelsinger traditionally takes the last day of the Spring Intel
Developer Forum to tell attendees about Intel's plans for new
technologies and products in the next five to 10 years.
In previous years, he has talked up everything from
software-defined radios to biosensor networks, but this year he
focused on Intel's fundamental role as a chip architect.
"We're at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the digitisation of
information," Gelsinger said, adding that as more and more
information is recorded digitally, processors will need to handle
terabytes of data and deliver tera bits per second of bandwidth.
One terabyte is equal to one trillion bytes.
To handle that much data, computers will need to adapt, search
through large amounts of data for relevant information and reach a
conclusion based on the whole process, Gelsinger said. Performance
will increase through shrinking transistors and other innovations,
but an architectural change is necessary to handle the tera
era.
It's not just processing power that needs to increase in order
to reach those goals, Gelsinger said, stressing that memory,
interconnects and storage will all need to scale alongside
processing power to realise this vision of the future.
One way Intel is working to enable the tera era is through the
use of architectural techniques such as helper threads, which
increase the performance of single-threaded applications by
executing as many tasks as possible in parallel on a single
processor.
This technique becomes even more effective as multicore
processors roll out, Gelsinger said. Multicore processors integrate
more than one central processing unit onto a single chip.
Another method is the use of software-defined radios to allow
users to switch quickly between wireless connections to communicate
as effectively as possible, Gelsinger said.
Tom Krazit writes for IDG News
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