Intel predicts an all IA future, consigns CUDA to the footnotes
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Silicon, Futures, Intel, Server on
With Intel’s 40th birthday on the horizon (and with it the 40th anniversary of the microprocessor), Intel’s Pat Gelsinger took a few minutes yesterday to ruminate on the past, present and future - and to take a few questions.
Beginning with a look back to the i386, and the shift from 16 to 32-bit computing, Gelsinger pointed to a time of technical and industry transition, much like today. It was the point where Compaq moved ahead of IBM, and Windows and Microsoft began to shape the software industry. We’re in the middle of another shift at the moment, what Gelsinger called the “third era of Moore’s Law”.
The first era was the age of invention, with the second concentrating on scale and manufacturing. Gelsinger calls the third era “The right hand turn”, where the industry starts to concentrate on energy efficiency. He went on to describe the industry’s success as resulting from “the power of compatibility”, where compatible software means that each generation of silicon can inherit the work of the entire industry (with just a little recompile along the way). There have been plenty of changes in Microprocessor design, purely by increasing numbers of transistors - the power controller on Intel’s Nehalem processors is bigger than Gelsinger’s first processor. There’s a sheer complexity to these machines, which Gelsinger described as “the most advanced things ever built”.
That’s the past and today, so what about tomorrow? Intel reckons on having 10 years of visibility into the future of silicon. Gelsinger described silicon as “the scaffolding for half the periodic table”. The future will be much the same, even if it’s based on silicon nanowires and spintronics. The first big change will be in just a couple of years, with the shift to 450mm wafers. The investment this requires will be huge, and Intel expects this to trigger a wave of industry consolidations - just to help pay for the new fabs.
Gelsinger also sees Intel’s IA architecture as a key differentiator between it and the rest of the industry. As multicore systems become more and more common, and as IA scales up to teraflop terascale systems and down to milliwatts, software will be compatible between all the different versions of the architecture. There of course will be different languages and libraries (especially for parallel processing systems), but code will be portable.
The result will be what Gelsinger calls an “AE724″ world. Bill Gates’ vision was a computer on every desk and in every home, Intel’s is much more ambitious. It’s a world where everyone has access to the Internet, with computing embedded into the environment and the infrastructure - everywhere you can imagine. It’s certainly a big picture - and one that will mean a shift in the way we develop applications and in how we design networks and data centres.
We blogged about GPU-based computing last week, and Gelsinger was asked about Intel’s response to NVIDIA’s CUDA and AMD’s CTM. Describing CUDA as “an interesting footnote in the history of computing”, Gelsinger talked about GPU computing as a cool idea that required a new programming model. He felt that this would be hard to deal with compared to general purpose computing techniques, and suggested that Intel’s massively multicore Larabee would be the right answer in the long term.
It’s true the microprocessor and the software stack make a huge difference. I probably wouldn’t have dialed in to the conference call if Skype didn’t connect to US 1-800 numbers for free from anywhere in the world. Whether the future’s all Intel is another question. IA is an important architecture but there’s still space for low power alternatives like ARM, or for specialised co-processors from the likes of Toshiba, Azul, AMD and NVIDIA. General purpose silicon is just one way of working - and if you’re prepared to target a specific niche there’s still plenty of scope to make a very healthy profit with specialised silicon.
–Simon
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