IBM Creates Vertical Market Processors
By Ed Sperling -- EDN, October 10, 2006
IBM today will begin detailing a new approach in designing computer processors, building them for vertical sectors where specific features can offer significant performance improvements with no power penalty.
The company’s first target market is financial services, one of Big Blue’s core markets. By adding in a decimal floating point accelerator, the company believes it can improve performance in making financial calculations and actually reduce the money lost in rounding errors, said Brad McCredie, chief engineer for IBM’s POWER6 chip.
“We’ve done things outside the core to scale the memory subsystem, so it’s a balanced, tie-in system,” McCredie said. “What you also see is in POWER6 versus POWER5 is that we’ve got two times the bandwidth into the chip.”
That bandwidth also opens the doors for chips made by IBM’s partners, an approach now being taken by companies like AMD and Intel.
IBM has been talking about this tack for the past couple years, calling it “holistic” design that extends well beyond the processor. By modifying the components around the processor, the same processor—or at least derivatives of the design—can be used for different purposes with entirely different results. For example, McCredie said the busses in the chip can run in 2 byte mode at lower power in what he calls “cost-effective mode,” or they can run in 8 byte mode for higher-performance computing applications.
“What you’re seeing is a flexible system design,” he said, noting that the next logical choice for customizing the chip will be in the Java space. “Java is very ubiquitous in mid-tier applications, but right now they have to run on a Java virtual machine. We may get to a hard implementation of that.”
Exactly where IBM takes this strategy is being discussed within IBM, but the results are already generating buzz in the customer world and among analysts. Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, said this is the first time any company has taken a vertical focus with processors.
“ATI and Nvdia are both developing products that take a video card and apply it to physics workloads,” said King. “But nobody is doing that kind of stuff at the enterprise level except IBM.”
The question now is whether customers will bite. “The key for any vendor is to put together technology that meets the potential needs of customers or that can entice new customers. It all comes down to what products ultimately look like and the cost,” King said, adding that he believes financial services companies will see the benefits and pay the additional cost.
McCredie is expected to begin detailing the architecture late this morning at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose.
