Session 5 overview: Processors

Processors have long been the leading edge of integration and process technology and this year´s papers emphatically demonstrate that this is still the case. This year´s crop of processors exhibit astounding increases in chip integration levels with more cores, special-function units and huge increases in the bandwidth of both on- and off-die interconnect. Emerging markets combine the attributes of network processors (many-threaded low-power cores) and server processors (large cores with virtualization and RAS). Higher levels of memory integration are achieved by using embedded DRAM in these large processors to support the higher-bandwidth demands of throughput computing. The challenges of managing the dramatic growth in dynamic power and leakage (if all integrated components were allowed to activate simultaneously) are addressed with a variety of innovative power management methods such as on-die gating and multiple voltage and frequency domains. Moore´s law continues as the first 32nm processors from Intel and AMD are described, together with the latest implementation of the POWER and SPARC architectures.