ISSCC: Samsung big.little, but no Intel, Nvidia CPUs

Godson update

“It could be part of Project Denver or a technology to connect multiple GPUs together for Tesla-based supercomputer support,” said Krewell of Linley Group. “I haven't heard any details of how Project Denver is proceeding, but Nvidia certainly needs to develop high performance interfaces that can connect arrays of Project Denver heterogeneous processors."

Nvidia’s graphics chips are already widely used in massive clusters for supercomputers, including the world’s current fastest system called Titan.

Separately, China’s Institute of Computing Technology will describe a new version of the Godson 3B processor made using a 32-nm process. Previously ICT showed eight-core 65-nm CPUs and suggested it would leapfrog to 28-nm designs.

At ISSCC, engineers will detail Godson-3B1500, a 32-nm high-K, metal gate part delivering 172.8 Gflops when running at 1.35 GHz at 40 W. That’s up from 128 Gflops for the 65-nm version also drawing 40 W, thanks to the new process as well as architecture and circuit enhancements.

Among other papers, Texas Instruments and MIT will describe a 200-MHz video decoder implementing the High-Efficiency Video Coding draft standard to deliver 249 Mpixels/s. It enables 3840 x 2160 pixel resolution while consuming 76 mW at 0.9 V.

Renesas will describe a 28-nm integrated handset SoC with a dual-core 1.5 GHz CPU, an LTE/HSPA+ baseband modem processor, graphics accelerators and a power management unit. AMD, IBM and Oracle will present papers on their Jaguar, zSeries and Sparc T5 processors already described in August at Hot Chips.

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