Legit Event Reviews

Intel IDF 2011 Closing Keynote - Intel CTO Justin Rattner

Manufacturer: Intel
Product: Intel IDF Keynote
Date: Thu, Sep 15, 2011 - 12:00 PM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
Share:

Hybrid DRAM Stack Demo


Intel IDF 2011

Next Intel wanted to talk about the future and where are we headed... I thought that is what they were talking about the past half an hour, but now they wanted to talk about the future in ten years.

Intel IDF 2011

Intel wants to set a 10 year goal for efficiency and wants a ~300x improvement in energy efficiency equal to 20 pJ/FLOPS at the system level. Intel is focused on bringing extreme scale computing to reality by the end of the decade.

Intel IDF 2011

Today a 100 GFLOPS Intel Xeon powered system uses roughly 200W of power. In the future the company wants to bring that down to just 2W in 2018. Note that Intel is talking about the entire system here and not just the processor!

Intel IDF 2011

Intel next talked about the benefits of near threshold voltage operation and how it will bring longer batter lives for mobile computing and help in meeting extreme-scale compute challenges.

Intel IDF 2011

Intel shows the solar powered system again and this time it was running Linux and has a codename - Claremont. This was the system that shows off a 'near threshold voltage IA processor' running an animated GIF image. This concept chip can ramp from full performance to ultra low power (<10mW). This is a 5x improvement, but it's using a older Pentium core. Intel feels that if they used a new core design that they could have gotten a 8-10x improvement.

Intel IDF 2011

Intel showed off a system today that scaled to over 10x the frequency of the previous demo when running at nominal supply voltage and played a game demo (the original Quake) and the GIF at the same time on the Pentium processor running off the same solar cell. Intel went on to joke about having troubles finding a Pentium board to run this demo on and that they had to buy one off E-bay, which I find hard to believe.

Intel IDF 2011

Intel next talked about stacked memory and explained that it is very power efficient and they are running at nearly 1 Terabit per second with something called a Hybrid DRAM Stack. Intel says the company is able to get the highest bandwidth to a single DRAM device with this solution and collaborated with Micron Technology to do so. Intel and Micron are partners for NAND Flash memory, so no big shocker here. The big shocker is what the two companies did next for the demo.

Intel IDF 2011

Intel did a Hybrid DRAM Stack demo on the stage that was pretty wicked in the sense of the speeds that the company was able to reach.

Intel IDF 2011

We haven't seen any DDR4 bandwidth predictions yet, but that all changed with this demo as test shows that DDR4 memory will range from 15-22.5 GB/s for a module. This Hybrid DRAM Stack that they had on stage was hitting roughly 122 GB/s! Intel said we need new hardware, new operating systems and everything across the board for this to become mainstream. That is a ton of bandwidth and that demo concluded the final keynote of IDF 2011.

We will be back for IDF 2012, but be sure to keep reading the site for daily hardware news and reviews!

Questions or Comments? View this thread in our forums!

Return to Event Home or Return Home


Review Index
Page 1 - The 10 Year Goal For Many-Core Computing
Page 2 - JavaScript Physics demo
Page 3 - Hybrid DRAM Stack Demo