Chips clock up new approach
Published: 10 Jun 2004 11:50 BST
That's a term that gets thrown around a lot in the tech world. What's your definition?
Holistic design means that you don't only worry about the bits and molecules that make up individual transistors. You also worry about the way in which they have been carved into a circuit. You worry beyond that about the way those circuits have been assembled into an architecture that winds up on a chip. You then continue right up the stack to how they are packaged, how they fit in the system and, even more importantly, how they interact with the system software.
Power consumption is becoming a critical factor, limiting performance. You have to have a means by which you proactively and holistically address that by allowing your actual system to command changes in the chip to optimise the utilisation of energy. It is really an extraordinary event. I am hoping that people really understand the sort of discontinuity we are talking about here.
What would be practical?
We are even building in the capability for the chip to physically morph, if required. For instance, you spot an excessive number of fails occurring in the memory -- we have techniques in software that recognise those errors. But if it turns out that for whatever reason, one segment of the chip drives an extreme amount of correction, one can easily envision the system autonomically issuing a command to remove that segment. We are talking about moving off to an entirely different plane. This is very different from: "Here is the chip, here is what it does, and that is the end of it."
At the same time, you are proposing a more interactive way of developing electronic devices, whether large like a supercomputer or small like a handheld.
This is basically going by the premise that I have sort of lived by for a long time, which is: the world is full of incredibly bright people. What happens when we say, look, here is the Power architecture, here is the Power core, here is how you hook up and work with it, here are the tools you need to do so?
If you have a designer out there and this designer is the brightest person out there but has never been able to engage, because we had closed systems -- when you throw open a system, and you make it readily available, this person says, "gee, I can build a core that operates and communicates on behalf of this chip. I can list it in the library as being fully compatible with the Power architecture, which means that anybody who builds a Power chip could license this (intellectual property) from me for some amount of money."
Then, when companies are building (system-on-chip processors), they can actually assemble a chip where they use our core, somebody else's (input-output system) and somebody else's memory controller, because they have all been built to a common standard.
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Building AI into hardware...sounds like 'software'... Kikki Bona Sijabat
