Deconstructing the Computer Report of a Symposium (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Panel II: Computer Hardware and Components
Panel II: Computer Hardware and Components
Pages 27-47
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From page 27... ...
Spencer, invoking the Silicon Valley saw that "the cost of every integrated circuit will ultimately be $5 except for those that cost less," observed that rapid decline in semiconductor cost and consequent growth in the speed and density of processors and memory have allowed software and systems designers "to get very sloppy." Therefore, as a technology wall looms for hardware, productivity can be expected to increase in software and systems, where a great deal of capability remains untapped. Endorsing Dr.
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From page 28... ...
PROCESSOR EVOLUTION William T Siegle Advanced Micro Devices Dr.
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From page 29... ...
Turning to architecture and design, he said significant progress on these fronts has been a necessary accompaniment to improvements occurring in fabrication technology. Analogizing to the high-level concept that a building architect works out based on the needs and wishes of a prospective homeowner, he defined computer architecture as a high-level model of data flow and data processing that enables a prescribed series of instructions to be executed; although not a blueprint from which a device can be built, it is still a necessary starting point.
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From page 30... ...
Looking back on the first version of Opteron, he recalled being "almost dumbfounded that first silicon was good enough to give samples to Microsoft to begin playing with." Joining with chip makers and academic institutions in moving design capability forward have been design automation (EDA) companies that supply device
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From page 31... ...
So rather than relying entirely on EDA companies, AMD and, he speculated, most other device manufacturers develop hand-honed design tools of their own that work their way to the general community after a period during which hardening up makes them accessible to "a perhaps less sophisticated set of users." Similarly, in the fabrication end of the business, working with captive capability offers advantages unavailable through an arm's-length relationship with a foundry. And just as foundries, which flourish in Taiwan, are situated largely offshore, there is an increasing tendency for software and design centers to be set up in various parts of the world to take advantage of talent and costs that are more advantageous than they might be in the U.S
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From page 32... ...
In order to keep resistance as low as possible at the transistor-gate level, changes have been made repeatedly: The tungsten silicide material used in the Am386 had evolved into titanium silicide by the mid-1990s and into cobalt silicide by the late 1990s, and it was expected to evolve again, into nickel silicide, over the next few years. The material that insulates one wire from another in the interconnect space has for a long time been "rather plain" silicon dioxide, but in the last few years a significant amount of energy has been poured into reducing the rather high dielectric constant of that material.
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From page 33... ...
A significant rise in the cost of manufacturing facilities has been a predictable consequence of the escalation of the cost of equipment, and of control and automation technology required to reduce variability, that has accompanied the overall increase of sophistication in the industry. The price of a chip plant has evolved from a few hundred million dollars at the time AMD was building the Am386 to well in excess of $2 billion for a modern 300-mm fab.
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From page 34... ...
Semiconductor Instruments Devices (Lucent Epson Technology Logic Logic Semiconductor Technologies Technologies Intel Toshiba STMicroelectronics Texas Samsung NEC Hitachi Motorola Infineon Philips IBM AMD Mitsubishi Matsushita Fujitsu Agere Sanyo Hynix Micron Sony Analog Sharp Agilent National LSI Rohm Atmel Fairchild Qualcomm NVIDIA On Xilinx Maxim Elpida Via Oki Broadcom Conexant ATI Altera Cypress International Seiko Linear Macronix Microchip Cirrus Integrated Intersil Winbond can to $3B annual than issues. analysis.
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From page 35... ...
"If you're willing to partner, you can get away with about $3 billion of revenue." Displaying a chart illustrating how much annual revenue a company now needs to be able to afford a megafab, he noted that only Intel among the world's major device makers would be placed in the former category based on 2001 revenues; if revenues for 2000 were used as the basis, the category would include another seven of the largest firms (see Figure 9)
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From page 36... ...
A substantial task requiring a leading-edge fab, technology integration has generally been the province of the major chip makers; it usually has a development cycle of two to three years "after the long lead research is far enough along for integration." AMD and IBM had in recent months announced a joint development arrangement, a way for the companies to deal with the cost, which would be excessive for either on its own, of having an R&D facility to do the work needed to get ready for production. Summing up, Dr.
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From page 37... ...
Manufacturing around 200,000 drives per day, a production level that requires world-class manufacturing and design capabilities, Seagate is the world's leading shipper of disk drives: It totaled around 18 million units in the final quarter of FY2002. The company handles development mainly in the United States, with one development center in Singapore, and manufactures mainly in the Far East, although it also has factories in the United States, Mexico, and Northern Ireland.
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From page 38... ...
or a Ph.D.; significant outlays for both R&D and capital expenditure; state-of-the-art manufacturing capability; acute focus on OEM relationships; and the ability to contend with both short product life-cycles and huge pricing pressure. Such characteristics have prompted Seagate's chairman and CEO, Steve Luczo, to call the disk drive industry "the extreme sport of the business world" and Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma, to describe Seagate and its competitors as "the closest things to fruit flies that the business world will ever see." This shakeout has nonetheless brought some stability to the sector, in Mr.
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From page 39... ...
"There is continued growth and need for storage, so it's not going away. It's really a question of how do we do it and what are the economics of it." The next chart showed that the price of rotating magnetic memory on a dol Petabytes of storage shipped expected to grow at 62% CAGR Units of storage shipped expected to grow at 13% CAGR 60,000 Actual Projection 50,000 Shipped 40,000 30,000 Petabytes 20,000 10,000 0 1997A 1998A 1999A 2000A 2001A 2002E 2003E 2004E 2005E 2006E Calendar Years FIGURE 11 Capacity: Future storage growth.
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From page 40... ...
Whitmore acknowledged that using silicon storage will be appropriate at particular price and capacity points, he attributed the consolidation of the disk drive industry to the massive erosion in the price of its product, saying: "It's kind of `the strong will survive' here, because we're going at a pace that's just burning people out." Another chart indicated that input/output transactions per second (IOPS) had shown accelerated growth between the late 1980s and the late 1990s, when improvement leveled off (see Figure 13)
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From page 41... ...
The term is useful for comparing different types of media, such as magnetic discs and optical discs. Current magnetic disks and optical disks have areal densities of several gigabits per square inch.
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From page 42... ...
and is considered five years from commercial production, will theoretically extend the density of recording beyond 10 Tbit per square inch while leaving the process of reading the data from the disk drive unchanged. "The beauty of this technology," Mr.
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From page 43... ...
43 26" 24" 14" 9" 8.25" 8" 5.25" 3.5" 2.5" 2010 2000 1990 Year 42% Ship (1957-2002) 1980 100%100% Customer (1990-2002)
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From page 44... ...
He looked for significant growth, however, to broad applications in smaller-capacity, more consumer-related products: in mobile PCs, a market that is "just starting"; in various hand held appliances, from PDAs and personal audio devices to cameras and multimedia cell phones; and in external storage devices. In addition, computerizing the infrastructure of the home -- having a server driving all the PCs and other electronics in the house, as well as putting disk drives in televisions and other devices -- is in its infancy but is "becoming real and will continue to grow." In conclusion, Mr.
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From page 45... ...
Mr. Whitmore explained that RAID is an architecture for arranging disk drives so that there is redundancy in data protection and pointed to different schemes, from a higher-end enterprise system to a method of packaging exemplified by Google that calls for arranging drives in a low-cost system.
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From page 46... ...
The simplest example is the line of technical advance that Moore's law characterizes, in which processor speed doubles every 18 months or so, resulting in a well-established technical and market trajectory for microprocessors with specifiable performance and features whose relatively high initial costs decline with the scale of production and that are sold at predictable, declining price points over time to PC makers and other customers. Intel's newest, most advanced microprocessors would then characterize the leading edge, typically produced with the latest, most expensive process technology, and capable of outstanding performance.
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From page 47... ...
Sticking to the minimum sophistication needed could boost manufacturing efficiency, because backing off on the technology can get the yields up and the cost down at a faster rate. But while need for continued lower cost drives removing features on the one hand, on the other hand applications still exist that require higher processor speed.
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