Reinvented Transistors
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SHARING BEST PRACTICES WITH THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY COMMUNITY WINTER 2008 MAGAZINE ALSO INSIDE QUAD-CORE: FASTER BY DESIGN EDA Among First to Reap Benefits of Multi-Core Architecture PAGE 44 COMPARING MULTI-CORE PROCESSORS For Server Virtualization PAGE 30 SOLARIS SOARS On Intel Architecture PAGE 58 article reprint Reinvented Creating the Next Wave of Transistors Quad-Core Processors 45-nm breakthrough enables 45-nm Manufacturing high performance and energy efficiency in the next generation of Creating the Next Wave multi-core processors. of Quad-Core Processors Like this article? Get the full magazine at http://ipip.intel.com. Join the Intel Premier IT Professional program—sharing IT best practices and Intel product information through events, webinars, podcasts, and publications. contents 4 check out the digital version of this magazine online at 8 20 www.intelpremierIT-digital.com Winter 2008 4 Starting Lines 40 PCs as Strategic Assets a roundup on tera-scale computing, Intel IT’s intel’s approach to manage PCs as strategic 2006 Performance Report, and an Intel rock video assets has resulted in lower TCO and increased capabilities. Read how we did it 8 Keeping it Cool intel’s participation as a founder of the 44 Bootstrapping by Design Climate Savers Computing Initiative underscores its quad-core cpus will make future chips easier commitment to energy efficiency to design 12 The Water Cooler Goes Global and Virtual 48 It’s All About the Performance intel derives innovation and inspiration from bmw works with Intel to derive maximum internal blogs and wikis performance on the track, with consumers, and in the data center 16 Transforming Intel IT an aggressive data center efficiency plan will 54 Behind the Scenes shake up the way Intel delivers IT resources how intel plays a supporting role powering Pixar’s animation technology 20 Saving the Internet harvard’s jonathan Zittrain on overcoming the 58 Solaris Soars on Intel Architecture Internet’s lack of structure alliance means greater flexibility and choice for CIOs 26 Keeping an Eye on the Future northrop grumman uses IT as a catalyst for 62 Wet Side Story faster growth the case for using wet-side economizers in the data center to achieve cost reductions while 30 Comparing Multi-Core Processors for Server going green Virtualization intel shows better performance and lower costs 66 A Vision for Vista running virtual servers on quad-core architecture intel it study shows benefits—and challenges—of early adoption of Windows Vista 36 Creating the Next Wave of Quad-Core 45-nanometer breakthrough enables high performance and energy efficiency premier it | winter 2008 | www.intel.com/info/ipip 1 intel’s recent introduction of 45- 45-nanometer nanometer technology with hafnium- based high-k metal gate transistor breakthrough design represents the most significant enables high change in transistor technology in the performance and past 40 years. This technology, which energy efficiency will debut this year in Intel’s new microprocessors microprocessor family, code-named Creating Penryn, will have a profound impact on mobile, desktop, and server devices the designed to provide high performance and energy efficiency. Our achievement in bringing this technology to fruition reflects our ded- high-k metal ication to innovation and continues gate transistors are the driving our storied history in the development force behind the 45-nanometer Next of silicon architecture. We believe that products. the conversion to high-k metal gate is revolutionary. Though it has been scaled and made thinner and smaller, Intel has used the same basic transis- Waveof tor structure since the 1960s. This new technology improves on the 65-nanome- Quad-Core ter technology we introduced in 2005 in several ways, including: more than 35 years. As for cost, the price of a Penryn by a factor of five. It is also possible to adjust this pDoubling the transistor density, enabling a smaller transistor is about one-millionth what a transistor tradeoff so that the switching and power settings are Processors chip size, increased transistor count, or both cost in 1968. established somewhere between high and low. pA 30 percent reduction in transistor switching As a result of the decreased transistor size A reduction in gate leakage equal to 10 times the power and increased transistor density, we dramatically previous technology is another benefit of high-k tech- pA 20 percent improvement in transistor switching increased the availability of processors based on nology. The entire semiconductor industry is strug- speed, or reduction of source-drain leakage to one- Intel® quad-core technology. Now, this new tech- gling to deal with the heat generated by chips, which fifth of the previous 65-nanometer process nology effectively doubles the computing capacity grows exponentially as the number of transistors pA reduction in gate oxide leakage power to one- of products available to IT decision makers, just as increases. Leakage control using high-k materials is tenth of the previous process technology moving from single-core to dual-core products did. one way to help transistors run cooler. In addition, we ensured that Penryn processors main- This is a boon to data center managers, because Abiding by Moore’s Law tained backwards compatibility while still providing Penryn processors can offer significantly higher clock Intel is a longtime adherent to Moore’s Law, which meaningful performance and feature enhancements. speeds on a richer microarchitecture while staying was formulated by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore within existing platform thermal constraints. As a Executive and refers to the continual scaling of transistor Bridging the Gap with High-K Metal result, they can install more computing power while Summary dimensions: reducing feature size, reducing the cost Gate Transistors utilizing the same amount of electricity and maintain- New, tiny 45-nanometer per transistor, and increasing the number of transis- High-k metal gate transistors are the driving force ing the same thermal footprint in the data center. transistors will be inside tors per chip. As a result, we have consistently—every behind the 45-nanometer products, which have over- High-k gate dielectrics can achieve such dramatic the next-generation two years—reduced feature size by seven-tenths, come the barrier between previous generations of gate leakage reductions because they are thicker than Intel® Core™2 Duo, decreased the cost per transistor by half, and doubled transistor technology and future generations. the silicon dioxide dielectrics that they replace, yet Intel Core 2 Quad, and the transistor count. One of the advantages of high-k metal gate still provide the higher capacity needed for improved Xeon® families of multi- Consider this: In 1970, Intel chips contained transistors involves the tradeoff between increased transistor performance. As a result, devices based on core processors. approximately 2,000 transistors each, whereas the switching speed and reduced power. In performance- them run cooler. The high-k materials require a new latest Itanium® processors hold more than 1 billion oriented environments, the switching speed can be manufacturing process to lay down a thickness of one transistors. That means that we have been doubling upgraded 20 percent over previous processors, while molecular level at a time. In our never-ending quest the number of transistors per chip every two years for devices that require lower power can have it reduced to obey Moore’s Law, we’re working to identify the premier it | winter 2008 | www.intel.com/info/ipip premier it | winter 2008 | www.intel.com/info/ipip 36 illustrations by wes duvall 37 second generation of high-k metal gate transistors, which requires significantly more transistors to implement than will extend scaling even further. the previous Radix 4 divider did. The Radix 16 divider greatly benefits scientific computing applications such Innovative Conversion Process as physics, mechanical engineering, and material sci- We were able to decrease gate leakage by converting the ence that include high numbers of divide and square root older silicon dioxide gate insulator to a high-k insulator. instructions. This was a major challenge because we wanted to make By implementing a full-width, single-pass super the insulator as thin as possible, both to improve transistor shuffler unit that is 128 bits wide, Penryn processors can performance and to provide greater dimensional scaling. perform full-width shuffles in a single cycle, once again We knew as early as 1995 that the silicon dioxide insu- leveraging the transistor density available in the 45-nano- lator was reaching its end, but we had time to resolve the meter process technology. This significantly improves problem because we were still a couple of generations performance for many instructions that have shuffle-like away from hitting the wall—which arrived when we operations, such as pack, unpack, and wider packed shifts. couldn’t scale any more between 90- and 65-nanometer These are part of Intel’s various Streaming SIMD Exten- generations. At that point, the insulator had been scaled to sions (SSE) instruction packs, which include SSE, SSE2, a thickness of 1.2 nanometers, which is about five silicon SSE3, and the new-for-Penryn SSE4. These instructions atomic layers. rapidly rearrange data into SIMD registers for additional Faced with that roadblock, we started thinking about vector manipulations, thereby increasing performance how to get past the gate insulator scaling limit. Fortu- for content creation, imaging, video, and high-perfor- can offload work from graphics engines and video- With virtualization top-of-mind for IT decision nately, our development team created a solution that mance computing. capturing devices—which are good at some tasks— makers across industries, these performance gains changed the gate insulator from silicon dioxide to the Still driven to develop more power-efficient products, and pass it back to CPUs—which are good at others.