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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News -
Platforms:
IBM Perfects Making Low Power,
High Performance Processors
IBM announced it has developed a new method of manufacturing low power,
high
performance microprocessors using an industry-first combination of
silicon-on-insulator (SOI), strained silicon and copper wiring
technologies.
IBM is putting the technique immediately to work in volume 90 nanometer
production at its 300mm manufacturing facility. The company's award-winning
64-bit PowerPC 970FX microprocessor will be the first chip built using this
trio of IBM technology breakthroughs.
Early PowerPC 970FX chips produced with the new technology deliver
significant
power savings, while performing at an equal or higher clock speed than
comparable processors. The company expects to realize even greater gains in
processor efficiency as it ramps production of the new process technology.
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"Our decades-long commitment to pursuing and rapidly implementing
technology
breakthroughs like SOI and strained silicon is paving the way for a new
generation of power savvy chips," said Bernard S. Meyerson, IBM Fellow and
chief technologist of IBM Systems and Technology Group. "With this fusion of
IBM-pioneered technologies, customers no longer have to sacrifice performance
to achieve the power savings they increasingly demand."
Today, chip designers and manufacturers are confronted by conflicting
pursuits
of increased processing speed and reduced power consumption. Typically, in
order to achieve one of these goals, chip-makers need to sacrifice or
significantly impair the other -- trading power consumption for performance,
and vice versa. IBM conquered this challenge by integrating strained silicon
and SOI into the same manufacturing process. This breakthrough speeds the flow
of electrons through transistors to increase performance and provide an
insulating layer in the silicon that isolates transistors to decrease power
consumption.
PowerPC Power Tuning
IBM's versatile new PowerPC 970FX microprocessor is designed for use in a
wide
array of applications, from desktops to servers to storage and communications
products, which require 64-bit performance and/or low power consumption from a
microprocessor. Apple has announced that it will use the PowerPC 970FX in its
powerful new Xserve G5 1U rack-mount server.
The 970FX also takes advantage of another new IBM-refined power saving
technique -- enabled through sophisticated system-wide tuning and controlling
of processor frequency and voltage -- which was detailed in a presentation at
the International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco on
Feb. 16.
The PowerPC 970FX recently garnered the Microprocessor Report Analysts'
Choice
Award for Best Desktop Processor, ahead of the Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon
64 FX-51. The award was announced Feb. 5 in San Jose, Calif.
Derived from IBM's award-winning POWER4 dual-core microprocessor, the
PowerPC
970FX provides users with unrivaled 64-bit computing power, allowing new
applications to virtually address an astounding 18 exabytes (18 billion
billion bytes) of memory while also running 32-bit applications natively to
enable continued use of legacy software as they migrate to 64-bit
applications. The design of the 970FX also supports symmetric multi-processing
(SMP), allowing systems to be created that link multiple processors to work in
tandem for additional processing power.
"The power and performance of IBM's PowerPC 970FX, combined with the
openness
of Linux, provides a new level of versatility for embedded solutions," said
Kai Staats, co-founder and CEO of Terra Soft Solutions Inc. "It gives us the
flexibility to design and run applications anytime, anywhere, without the
burden of a power/performance trade-off."
The PowerPC 970FX uses the same underlying IBM POWER architecture behind
families of IBM microprocessors that power products ranging from consumer
electronics to supercomputers.
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