Start Your Engines
By Chris Rowen
Leadership in microprocessor architectures evolves over decades, and the intellectual battles for leadership provide sustained enlightenment and entertainment for programmers and engineers of every stripe. All this comes together in the big technical conferences on processors.
Leadership in processor conferences also has evolved over the years. These days, the Hot Chips Conference has risen to the top of the heap. Hot Chips 23 is coming up Aug. 17-19 at Stanford University and it looks to provide both entertainment and enlightenment.
The entertainment comes from now traditional battle of the advanced mainstream processors—x86 versus ARM, and within the x86 world, Intel vs. AMD, with talks on Intel’s second-generation Core microarchitecture, AMD’s Llano APU and Bulldozer cores, and ARM’s high-performance mobile CPU roadmap. And of course, the other architectures—IBM, Itanium and SPARC—are sweating to carve out niches of sustainable relevance around the mainstream microprocessors.
There’s also some cool technology with high entertainment value, including a whole Intel paper on generating better random numbers, Microsoft talking about the inner workings of the Kinect gesture recognition system, and new networking interfaces that push transaction rates into the billions per second. And for those who like a good fight, there’s a panel on “The Ecosystem Wars,” with bitter rivals in both processor architecture and operating systems facing off.
The best enlightenment will come from the remarkable range of talks on higher levels of silicon integration, successful scaling to many-core platforms and application-oriented processors. Talks on multi-core network processors (Cavium), multi-core security (Tilera), breaking the communications bottleneck in large-scale systems (UC Berkeley), many-core data center servers (SeaMicro) all highlight the importance of the parallelism problem. The Wednesday seminar on package-scale power manager also goes at the heart of a key issue.
And in the enlightenment category, I get to mention my big talk on Tensilica’s latest baseband engine, “The Worlds’ Fastest DSP Core: Breaking 100 GMAC/s barrier.”
The best part of this sort of conference, though, is the hallway interaction. The combination of camaraderie and intellectual competition is a compelling mix. It’s sure to be a good show.
–Chris Rowen is chief technology officer at Tensilica.
