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Cray has decided to develop its future HPC around Intel’s silicon. This has become a problem for AMD. Cray did in fact have fabrications from AMD which included XT3, XT4 and XT5. Unfortunately for AMD the organisation was hoping that Cray would strike a 5 year deal with the company securing their current status in the market. Cray have now made a 5 year deal with Intel for HPC which is a massive blow for AMD.

Crays development has been centred round building custom interconnects supporting multiple AMD chips through hypertransport (AMD interconnect). Intel has a rival technology called quickpath possible for their new Larrabee and Nehalem products.

Cray are hoping to combine their efforts. Cray will be using Intels Quickpath along with their own high-bandwidth memory subsystems. They are hoping this will give them a significant leap forward in high performance computational tasks. The result? an exaflop! One quadrillion operations a second, I’ve only heard of TeraFlops!

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I’ve always been interested in Apples stand in their product architecture, when Apple decided to make the move to the x86 platform openning new leases to Linux based OS not to mention being able to run windows. Any way moving back to the topic!

Apple have bought the Chip manufacturer PA Semi. On behalf of Apple they current develop low-power processors for their PowerPC architecture. Apple have used the firm for previous products such as the PowerBook and Power Mac.

As you are all aware Apple have used Intel Processors for their current x86 architecture systems. Apple have decided to use Intels Atom microprocessors for their future IPhone release, the iPhone currently uses the ARM-base microprocessor. The ARM-base based iPhone owned by StrongARM have been integrated into Intels organisation so the move to the x86 architecture is appropriate.

The migration to the new architecture ‘x86′ is problematic. There are many advantages of moving to the architecture from a developers point of view, create once and run forever, using the Atom based processor! compare this to the ARM processor, it has been created by different manufacturers causing incompatible software between versions, no future/ backward compatibility, in conclusion causing entirely separate versions of applications and Operating Systems. The consumer must also note that the architecture will run on any desktop and laptop system, well the majority, x86 based.

With the Apple buy out of PA, Apple has now said in their future specification of products they will influence PA’s future product base.

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High-K dielectric refers to a material with a high dielectric constant. The High-k is used in semiconductor manufacturing processes to replace the silicon dioxide within gate dielectrics. By implementation of the material, high-k further lowers the die size of processors. The technology is currently used in the Penryn Intel Processors.

IBM and partners have the lead with the implementation of HKMG high-k metal gate. IBMs semiconductor manufacturing has lead to the 32nm wafer. By implementing the 32nm technology they have found a 35 percent increase in performance compared to the 45nm process. The 32nm also consumed between 30 to 50 percent less power.

IBMs implementation of the high-k/metal gate within transistors that controlled primary on/off switching functionality lead to the development of 32nm chip circuitry. Intel Have already shown the 45nm process, so is there any point in upgrading your processor? Intel will no-doubt be designing their 35nm process.

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