Welcome to the new Intel Premier IT Professional zone! I hope that everyone who has visited the old IPIP site for content on technology and IT best practices will take advantage of the new Open Port site to engage us in a more interactive discussion on how we can make you more successful.
For my first few blogs I’m going to stick close to the script I normally use when speaking at IPIP events – HOWEVER, you’ll have to attend an event in person to take advantage of the live demos and the lively Q&A sessions, not to mention the animated frog video and the free Starbucks cards (admit it, you really want to get an IPIP event now, don’t you 
)
The theme of this blog is “Technology is providing tremendous benefits to IT”. I’m going to describe a number of key technology innovations and what they mean to you as an IT manager.
1) Multi-core CPUs
I was surprised (and a little dismayed) at a recent data center engineering workshop where I discovered that there were still a lot of engineers who perceived that Intel CPUs were still getting hotter and hotter over time. This hasn’t been the case for several years, and it’s because of multi-core technology. Since CPU power goes up with the square of the clock frequency it’s clear that we can’t just continue to run clocks faster and faster. Here’s a simple set of numbers to understand how multi-core works: If you increase the clock speed on a core by 20% you increase its power consumption by 73%. If you reduce the clock by 13% you reduce by power by 49% (but you still get 87% of the performance for most software). So let’s put two of these slower cores together – they consume the same power as the original core but provide 73% greater performance at that same power level. So you can see that multi-core is a key component of energy efficient CPUs.
2) 45nm High-K metal gate technology
The biggest recent advance in semiconductor technology is 45nm High-K metal gate technology. There is a ton of information that you can find on the intel.com website, but let’s hit the most important points. At these tiny topologies the insulation layer on a transistor is down to a width of 4 or 5 ATOMS, so there is a much greater opportunity for energy to escape through that insulator. The new materials we are using provide a much more effective insulator, and the result is that our new CPUs can run at higher frequencies (and therefore higher performance) with no increase in power consumption.
3) Microarchitecture
The microarchitecture is the foundation of how the CPU performs computing operations. Intel Core™ microarchitecture is optimized for multi-core CPUs and provides higher performance in the following ways:
More instructions per clock cycle (increase from 3 to 4)
Smart cache to reduce latency to frequently used data
Smart memory access with built-in intelligence to speculatively load data for instructions that are about to execute
New instructions that double the speed of execution of a wide range of video, imaging, financial, engineering and scientific applications
The microarchitecture also includes new instructions to increase energy efficiency. For data centers this means lower power and thermal burdens. For mobile users this means greater battery life and smaller form factors.
4) The “tick tock” model
Developing a new microarchitecture is a lot of hard work with a lot of extremely difficult technical challenges to overcome. So is a process shrink that reduces the distance between transistors and increases the density of the CPU package. To manage these innovations in a predictable and consistent cadence Intel follows the “tick tock” model, introducing a process shrink one year (the “tick”) and a new microarchitecture the next (the “tock”). In 2007 the Penryn CPU was introduced with a process shrink from 65nm to 45nm, as well as the high-k metal gate technology. In 2008 we will introduce the “Nehalem” microarchitecture with a host of new architectural improvements for performance and energy efficiency (see tomorrow’s blog for more details).
THE PUNCHLINE:
Put all those technology advances together and we have made tremendous strides in performance and energy efficiency. As we progressed from single core CPUs to the latest quad core CPUs performance has increased by 5.85 times with no increase in CPU power consumption.
Think of what that means for your data center where you may be worried about power and space. We did a paper calculation of a data center running 5.1 million business operations per second, which would have required 126 servers in 6 racks, requiring 240 square feet of space and 48kW of power in 2004 using the single core CPU of the day. Today with 45nm quad core CPUs the same work can be accomplished with 17 servers filling a fraction of a rack, and requiring only 40 square feet of space and 6kW of power. That’s an 83% reduction in floor space and 87% reduction in energy costs. At current power rates that’s a savings of $53K.
I hope I’ve been able to show how the cool technology we’re developing at Intel can translate into bottom line benefits for you as IT managers.
