To Add Speed, Chipmakers Tune Structure ~ finding ways around the physical problems ....

Business Week ^ | February 15, 2007, 12:00AM EST | Arik Hesseldahl

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

IBM, Intel, and AMD are finding ways around the physical problems that have hampered their efforts to make chips faster

To understand the quest to build ever faster and more powerful computers, it's helpful to understand the problems that hold them back from getting faster in the first place.

While chips themselves are getting faster all the time, faster is a relative term. Even though chipmakers like Intel (INTC) and IBM (IBM) are building more powerful chips every 12 to 18 months, other chips that go inside a computer haven't historically kept up in the performance race. If you think of a microprocessor as a fast-talking, fast-moving dynamo that never takes long to get anything done, then a dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip is a bit more of a loafer, forcing the processor to wait for it before it can get on with the task at hand. Worse, between them lies a narrow hallway that tends to get crowded easily, and when it does, work piles up.

If it all sounds a little like a discarded plot for a Dilbert cartoon, you're not very far from the truth. The solution could come straight from the playbook of the pointy-headed manager, but with one key difference: It works brilliantly. The solution is to first make the slowpoke move a lot faster, but then to put them both in the same office so they can work more closely together with nothing to get in the way.

Combo Chips

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

That's a simple way to describe the disclosure of a new approach to computer chip design unveiled by IBM on Feb. 14 at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, a chip technology event in San Jose, Calif. IBM calls the approach eDRAM—the "e" stands for "embedded"—and says that combining the two types of chip onto a single piece of silicon will substantially improve processor performance. IBM plans to integrate this technique into its chips beginning in 2008.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From the commentary section of the BW article ....a link :

How Computers Work
Processor and Main Memory
Plus: A New Computer Architecture
Roger Young

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Seems like if accessing memory is a problem, you would

1. put only one core on the chip and using the rest of the real estate for as much cache memory on the chip as possible.

2. use multiple layers of cost/speed tradeoff in memory:
   1. cache on chip
   2. SRAM chips
   3. DRAM
   4. flash memory or the new phase-change memory
   5. fast hard disk
   6. mass memory