IBM's Meyerson: Chip industry needs a 'Plan B'

The days of relying on shrinking transistors to achieve performance gains are over, and the chip industry needs to enter a new era of innovation where system-level features are just as important as thinner transistor gates, said IBM Corp.'s Bernie Meyerson in a keynote address at the Fall Processor Forum Tuesday.

For years, chip designers have been enabling huge increases in processor performance by sticking very closely to a two-year cycle of process technology reductions, said Meyerson, vice president and chief technologist at IBM's Systems and Technology Group. Smaller transistors allowed chip designers to crank up the clock speeds, add more cache memory and reduce the size of their processors without having to change many features from generation to generation, he said.

The advent of 90 nanometer process generation has changed that strategy for most chip makers, Meyerson said. Chips are now so small that atom-level defects on a silicon chip can cause power leakage up to 100 times the normal level, he said.

While current designs rely on innovations within the processor, future performance increases will be about chip and system-level innovation, Meyerson said. These future innovations include dual processing cores, embedded memory and software, he said.

"This industry has begun to travel down a road not traveled. We need to identify the things that will win in the future," Meyerson said.

The concerns presented by Meyerson weren't a surprise to the audience of chip designers and industry followers at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, California. Problems with power leakage at 90 nm and industry leader Intel Corp.'s shift away from skyrocketing clock speeds have been top concerns for just about every major microprocessor vendor and analyst firm over the last year.

In the 1980s, CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) transistors replaced bipolar transistors in order to keep the rate of processor innovation on track, Meyerson said. The industry needs a similar type of "Plan B" right now, but there are many different opinions as to how that shift should be accomplished, he said.

Dual-core designs are one way that the industry hopes to keep performance on track. IBM has had a dual-core processor since the introduction of the Power 4 in 2001, and much of the industry is planning to follow in those footsteps, Meyerson said. Two individual processor cores running more slowly than a single-core processor can outperform that chip without a huge increase in power consumption.

However, chip makers must avoid the temptations to cram as many processor cores as possible onto a chip, Meyerson said. This would eventually lead the industry down the same path blazed by faster and faster single-core designs, where relying on a single method eventually runs into a wall, he said.

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