The Low Energy Consuming Multicore Processor

Published:2011/7/13 1:43:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

The reason for the fast growing cloud computing which supported by social networking is posing challenges for data centre operators is because of the phenomenal increase in the levels of data traffic and the similar increase in the processing load.

The US company AT&T suggests that from the end 2007 to the end of 2010, the increasing factor that the amount of data being routed around communications networks is 30. Also, Cisco Systems predictes the amount of of wireless data traffic will quadruple by 2015, at that time some 20Exabyte of data will be flowing per month.

YouTube, Facebook and similar sites are the places where much of the data uploads to. For example, every month, there are more than 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook, and every minute there are 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube .

All these applications are operated at huge data centres placed strategically around the world. The data centres house thousands of servers, each of which consumes large amounts of power and releases plenty of heat. Reducing the heat requires air conditioning, which consumes almost as much power as that used by the servers. It is understandable that the data centre operators are looking to cut their costs by increasing the ratio of computing performance to the amount of power supplied.

The final acceptable solution is the multicore processor, where devices such as Intel’s Xeon processor offers four, six and eight cores. But there is a move beyond that to the so called many core processor. The processors are not aimed at every server application. These devices will focus on applications that run on thousands of servers. This represents a big chunk of the market and we believe our technology can bring an order of magnitude improvement in the performance per Watt ratio.

The challenge is how to put so many cores on the same chip. The idea of a 32 core cache coherent multiprocessor was first developed in 1994. The first system was built in 2002 to demonstrate the technology. The first commercial device, a 64 core chip, shipped in 2007.

The scalability refers to the ability of the device’s performance to increase linearly as more cores are added. And it is 90%, other technologies may only get 20%. The related integrated circuit is ATMEGA8L-8PU.

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