Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz » Chip makers to unveil future products next week at Solid State conference

February 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Chip makers to unveil future products next week at Solid State conference

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While the 2007 IEEE ISSCC [International Solid-State Circuits Conference] might sound a bit dull to non-engineers, it is in fact an exciting event where if you have the perseverance to read through the program and attend the session you will be rewarded with advanced looks at near-future technologies from the likes of AMD, Broadcom, Intel,and Sun to name a few.

Here's just a small sampling of some of the new chip technologies that will most likely become part of mainstream products within the next year.

Intel will unveil a new record for microprocessor performance with a 5GHz Power6 microprocessor. The network-on-chip version of the Power6 will achieve 4GHz performance.

The chip has an amazing 700 million transistors and is a dual-core processor fabricated on a 65 nanometer process.

Infineon Technologies will present its paper on a GSM baseband radio with fully integrated power management.

The integration of power management with memory, RF, digital and analog baseband functions will reduce the manufacturing cost of cell phones which should further reduce the retail price as well.
Cell phone chip count will come down to an amazing 3-chip solution.

Atheros Communications, one of the leaders in chips for Wi-Fi will present an integrated 802.11n-compliant MIMO [Multimedia In Multimedia out] baseband and MAC processor that will achieve the highest WLAN data rate to date of 300Mb per second and the longest reported WLAN range of 700 feet.

Broadcom will continue the news around wireless with two announce-ments: a signle-chip Bluetooth with enhanced data rate in a small package and a MIMO multi-band CMOS transceiver for WLAN applications.

By packing more capability into a smaller package both will increase battery life, cost of manufacture while improving performance.

Who says Sun's Sparc processor is dead?
Sun Microsystems will present a network-on-a-chip architecture, the Niagara-2 processor, with a peak performance of one TFLOP.

The chip is an 8-core, 64-thread, 64-bit SPARC System-on-a-Chip.

According to the presentation the chip can handle up to 64 programs at once, doubling the number that was reported last year.

The higher performance is achieved by integrating more components on a single chip.

Hitachi will introduce a 4,320 MIPS four-processor core chip with the ability to individually manage clock frequencies for lower power consumption.

According to the paper "invididual cores have independent dynamic-frequency control." This will also enable indepdendent voltage control of each core.

Intel rival AMD will be there too. It will unveil an integrated quad-core x86 Opteron processor. The Opteron includes power and thermal-managmeent techniques.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 5, 2007 03:25 PM

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