MPF: Sun to Set on Microprocessor

By Jessica Davis -- Electronic News, 10/14/2003

Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos today predicted the death of microprocessors by the year 2010 during his keynote address at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, Calif.

"Microprocessors will stop. You will not see sockets anymore," he said. "This will happen first in the embedded space. It's about delivering a system not a processor."

Papadopoulos believes a complete system on a chip will be achieved by 2010. At the Microprocessor Forum in 2010, "we will be talking about the art of rendering systems on silicon."

Sun's CTO delivered his vision for the future of microprocessors and systems while promoting Sun's concept of throughput computing, introduced earlier this year, and harkening back to the company's theme of network computing. Sun's throughput computing looks to perform highly efficient application performance by processing in parallel rather than today's model of very quickly processing one task at a time. The theory is that when processing on one thread is stalled, it can continue on an alternate thread, said Papadopoulos.

Indeed, several vendors this week at Microprocessor forum are announcing expansion of logical processors on the chip, further enhancing parallel processing at the chip level.

The rise of the Internet and how it delivers applications and Moore's law are driving the evolution to placing an entire system on a chip. Symmetric multiprocessing was the predecessor to this new era of computing, said Papadopoulos.

Ten years ago, application software scaled from 1 to 100 users, built on an operating system, built on a processor. But that has changed as the Web revolutionized delivery of applications services, said Papadopoulos. Now software must scale to tens of thousands to millions of users, and it must be operating system agnostic.

And following Moore's law, the functionality enabled by a network interface card that cost $50 to $100 ten years ago is now integrated on the motherboard for a few dollars. A decade from now that technology will be on chip and cost a few pennies, Papadopoulos said.

Those changes will provide users with the benefits of sharing network resources such as applications. The sharing will also help reduce costs. But the further shrinking of systems will magnify other challenges such as memory latency.

"The ability to pipe through memory and do it with energy efficiency is the word of the day," said Papadopoulos, who added that optical networks might offer a solution.

Sun is working on solutions to this and other new challenges posed by the future's system-on-chip evolution, with technologies such as proximity communication, controllers and transactional memory, according to Papadopoulos. These and other innovations will prepare the company for Papadopoulos's vision of the future

"The things that we call computers today will become components," he said. "The Net will become the backplane."