by Michele Chandler
At the opening keynote of the SEMICON West 2012 exhibition in San Francisco, Shekhar Borkar, Intel Fellow and Director of Extreme-Scale Technologies at Intel Corp., detailed research efforts to develop a new generation of computing systems. Borkar’s speech, “Ubiquitous Computing in the Coming Years — Technology Challenges and Opportunities,” described his research efforts to create new technologies which enable computers to work ever faster while consuming far less energy.
As they exist today, microprocessors do not carry very high energy efficiency, Borkar said. “But the next class, digital signal processors, have by two orders of magnitude better energy efficiency than general processors.”
Raising performance while cutting energy use has wide applications, from military uses to more powerful consumer devices.
“Think about a 20-watt petascale machine in Iraq. A petascale machine today is about as big as this room,” Borkar explained. But shrink it down so it fits on an airplane, he explained, and “now you can have a terascale machine sitting in the backpack of a solider. Or think about a terascale machine sitting in your laptop.”
He added, “What you see is from gigascale to terascale, the performance of the processors increased by 30X. From gigascale to petascale, the performance leapt by 250X. The system level performance increased faster than the transistor level performance or the processor level performance.”
Borkar then shifted gears to discuss upcoming advances in storage technology, which presently includes SRAMs, DRAMs, NANDs, PCMs and Disks, with SRAM semiconductor memory currently recognized as the most energy-efficient.
Borkar, who served as the principal investigator of the Ubiquitous High-Performing Computer project, an initiative funded by DARPA, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, said, “I expect the future systems to have SRAMS, DRAMS…as well as some disks.” Borkar said. “So, the DRAM is here to stay.”