Quad Core Chip Technology

These days flash memory rules: it’s small and rugged, and it keeps getting cheaper. But on the heels of flash comes faster, even more robust technology called phase-change memory, which is just starting to come out of the lab. Now Numonyx, a joint venture that combines the flash and phase-change memory efforts of Intel and STMicroelectronics, has officially launched its operations. In doing so, the company has taken a leading spot in the burgeoning phase-change memory industry. By the end of this year, Numonyx expects to commercialize phase-change memory, and by the middle of the next decade, the company hopes to make it increase its storage capacity to render it competitive with flash as a solid-state drive replacement.

Phase-change memory, which uses a glassy material, stores information via a change in its physical state, rather than using electrical charges, as in flash. A tiny electrode heats each memory cell; the cell’s state depends on the manner in which it is heated, and it subsequently represents either a 1 or a 0.

At a press conference in San Francisco on Monday, Brian Harrison, CEO of Numonyx, said that phase-change memory has all the benefits of NOR and NAND flash technologies. (NOR is used in cell phones to execute code, and NAND has been used as a storage memory.) For instance, said Harrison, phase-change memory can have data read from it quickly like NOR flash, and data can be written to it as quickly as in NAND flash. In addition, phase-change memory doesn’t wear out, losing bits of data over time, as flash memory does.

In the near term, phase-change memory could replace the expensive and energy-consuming random access memory in cell phones, and in a few more years, it could potentially become a cost-effective alternative to flash. A customer who uses a phone with phase-change memory might notice extended battery life, said Harrison. “Intel and STMicroelectronics have been working [together] on phase-change memory for more than five years,” he said. “We have a product today that we are sampling, and expect to bring it to market this year. Personally I can’t wait.

AMD has decided to take a small step back in the race for quad-core supremacy.  On Monday, AMD executives confirmed this weekend’s rumors and admitted that the company will indeed introduce a triple-core microprocessor sometime during the first quarter of 2008. “We believe that triple core is the right product at the right time to serve a broad swatch of market,” said AMD vice president Bob Brewer, at Monday’s briefing in San Francisco.

AMD stressed the update does not affect its planned launch date for a consumer-oriented quad-core chip, codenamed Phenom, which is slated for Q4 of this year.  According to AMD, the the tri-core processor makes sense from both a marketing and retail point of view. Due to the slow adoption rate of quad-core, as well as the lack of multi-threaded apps that take advantage of such processors, AMD is banking on the fact that a tri-core processor will offer desktop consumers an attractive middle-of-the-road option.

In particular, Brewer and other AMD executives cited a recent study from Mercury Research pointing out that quad-core processors represented less than two percent of desktop shipments during the second quarter, while dual-core took up the remaining 98 percent. Until demand ramps up for quad-core, triple core will serve as something of an intermediary, according to AMD. At the same time, the company hopes it will also stimulate broader multi-core adoption.

“We left the megahertz race for the core race,” said John Taylor, product communications director at AMD. “The sweet spot is now four (cores) and down … and there are a lot of scenarios where three cores outperforms dual core,” he said.

In terms of architecture, Brewer also confirmed on Monday that the yet-to-be named processor will basically be a quad-core processor with one core disabled, and that it will feature the company’s Direct Connect architecture, as well as a shared L3 cache, and other architectural selling points that Intel currently lacks.  “It’s simply a better intermediate step,” Brewer said, adding that triple core is about product management and design flexibility.

Conveniently enough, it’s also something AMD’s larger competitor, Intel, can’t do at the moment — or at least do well. “Do I rub my hands together a little about that fact? Sure,” said Brewer, “but ultimately this is about scaling.”

Another potential benefit Brookwood points to is production efficiency. If AMD finds it is having many of its quad-core Opteron processors coming off the production line with only three of the four cores fully functioning, then it can still market those as tri-core instead of chucking them into the trash can.

Of course, pricing will be crucial to the success or failure of AMD’s tri-core processors. On that topic, company executives wouldn’t comment other than to say that prices would be competitive.   They better, especially if Intel decides to drop the price of its quad-core processors to match or beat AMD tri-core chips.

Regardless of Intel’s reaction, AMD seems to be using its core strengths — namely, the five years of research and development that went into its Opteron line (formerly codenamed Barcelona) — to its advantage.  AMD executives promised last week that core features from the new quad-core architecture would trickle down to the consumer level. It’s now making good on that promise.  Sometimes slow-and-steady wins the race and it might be the case here.

After speaking with many developers including some big names, we learned that they can’t make much sense out of quad or more core CPUs. They confirm that they can put two cores to good use but not much more. The main problem is that the performance is far from scalable.   You have to spend both time and money to resource the programmer to try to make sense out f the dual core CPU. It takes up to a year to optimise the game for more threads and even if you make the perfect job you can count on twenty to thirty percent performance increase, and this is the best case scenario.   Once you start making the multi threaded game you end up making and having the multithreaded bugs as well.

You can keep one core busy with the physics and collision detection, second core will have to wait for the score to move on with the Artificial intelligence while the third core could possible calculate the graphic data. In this best case scenario you have to realise that the core number two and three would always have to wait for the core number one to finish its job and pass the job to the cores two and three. In this concept there is absolutely no place for quad core as games are non parallel applications. A game developer expert said that you can use the core number four to stream and load the data in the game and this is what the guys at Remedy did at IDF quad core demonstration. But this takes time and money and it is not commonly embraced by developers.

Game developers are in the dawn of dual core programming and now all the sudden AMD and Intel wants them to go quad core. For the time being Quad cores are good for rendering and serves but not for games.   So if you want to play games, you can forget about quad cores, you simply don’t need them and can gain just marginal performance out of them. Give the developers some time and this might change, but we are talking quarters not months.  My feeling is that game developers will come around and optimize for these new super face quads.