Chipmakers aim to unclog data paths
Published: 20 Aug 2007 11:01 BST
…that can more accurately and thoroughly examine data packets and toss out the unwanted ones. Video-on-demand systems, high-definition video, security systems and videoconferencing are also growing and will require faster systems.
Ultimately, these kinds of computing tasks are also going to downgrade the role of processing cores in the computing world.
"The processor is becoming more and more anonymous, and the system is becoming more and more important," Agarwal said. "The processor is the new transistor."
Who is Agarwal?
Agarwal has been a fixture in high-end chip designing for years. While a professor at Stanford in the early 1980s, he worked on the design of the MIPS chips, which helped Silicon Graphics achieve its gains back then. (Stanford University President John Hennessy was the leader of that project.) In 1991, Agarwal was a co-author on a paper presented at Hot Chips on Sparcle, a Sun processor that touted multithreading.
In 1996, he started to work on integrating mesh networking into chips. Tilera was founded in 2004.
So far, the company has raised $40m (£20m) from Bessemer Partners, Walden International and VTA, the venture capital arm of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), which will also manufacture the chip.
The architecture behind the Tile64, however, may only be adequate for cutting-edge chips for a decade or so, Agarwal theorised. His lab at MIT — as well as those at Intel, Luxtera and a number of other companies — are already examining ways to replace the metal connections between chip cores with faster, cooler, optical fibres.
Shrinking optical components so they can connect chip cores will take time. The technology is likely to be used to connect boards and components. Still, the mushrooming growth in cores may demand it.
MIT's research into inter-core optical connections "may see the light of day in 12 years — maybe 2016, 2017," Agarwal said. "When we want to go to 4,000 or 5,000 cores, we may need other technologies."
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