Silicon Graphics details MIPS road map
eetimes.com
By Anthony Cataldo
EE Times
(03/09/99, 6:07 p.m. EDT)
TOKYO — Silicon Graphics Inc. executives reaffirmed the company's
commitment to the MIPS architecture here on Tuesday (March 9),
adding details to its earlier annoucement of plans to extend MIPS CPUs
to speed grades of 800 MHz. The moves assure an extended life for
MIPS in SGI's high-end systems, even as the company prepares to
move to Intel's 64-bit Merced processor.
The new microprocessors — which include an R14000 to debut next
year, an R16000 for 2001 and perhaps an R18000 beyond — are
fundamentally stepwise improvements, faster speed grades and process
shrinks of the R10000 core, said John Mashey, SGI's chief scientist, in
a separate interview from the company's offices in Mountian View,
Calif. Customers approved of SGI's plans to migrate systems to Intel's
IA-64 and IA-32 processors, but wanted more overlap between those
systems and generations based on existing MIPS architectures, he said.
Last year when SGI spun out its MIPS processor division as a separate
unit targeting embedded cores, sources at the company said SGI would
not develop any MIPS CPUs for its workstation and server lines
beyond the R12000, though SGI had previously stated that it planned a
successor processors to the R12000 dubbed H1 and H2.
Mashey described the R14000, set to debut in mid-2000, as a
410-to-450-MHz speed grade of the existing R12000. The CPU will
also include such minor improvements as support for double-data rate
cache SRAMs. The R14000 also supports a 200-MHz external bus,
which is twice the speed of the current R12000 bus.
The R16000, which should follow in 2001, will run at 600 to 800 MHz.
It will double internal L1 instruction and data caches to 64 kbytes each
and support external L2 caches of 4 to 8 Mbytes. Designers are
considering integrating L2 cache tags on to the processor as well. "That
could really reduce some processing cycles," Mashey said.
The company is now considering whether it will produce a shrink of the
R16000, which might be dubbed the R18000, but that decision will be
contingent on demand for further MIPS-based systems beyond 2001.
Delays of the Intel Merced until mid-2000 played a minor role in SGI's
decision, announced earlier this year, to extend the life of MIPS at SGI.
"We are aiming to do stepwise enhancements to the R10000 which we
found had considerable more headroom than we thought," said Mashey.
The CPU details come less a year after SGI formed a strategic
alignment with Intel Corp. with plans to use that company's IA-32 and
IA-64 CPUs in future SGI systems. While SGI will design systems
using Intel's 32-bit and 64-bit processors, SGI's announced plans for
the MIPS 16000 indicate that SGI will continue to nurture its own
processor, operating system and system-architecture plans, executives
said at a press conference here Tuesday.
At the same forum, SGI boasted about its special agreement with Intel
that gives it more flexibility to add its own features to systems based on
the Intel architecture, and highlighted a new business relationship with a
large purchaser of SGI servers.
On the processor front, SGI plans to introduce two more generations of
MIPS processors following its recently announced R12000-based
systems. The upcoming MIPS generations will overlap Intel's
introduction of Merced, its first implementation of the IA-64
architecture.
By the end of 1999, SGI will increase the clock frequency of its newest
R12000 processors to 390 MHz. By 2000, it will debut systems based
on new R14000 processors running as high as 450 MHz. Those
processors are now being developed at NEC Corp.
By 2001, SGI will introduce yet another generation of MIPS, the
R16000. The first iteration will run at 600 MHz, and will be upgraded
to 800 MHz in less than a year, according to SGI's road map.
SGI executives said they plan to support both MIPS-based and
IA-64-based systems for the next several years as the company gets
ready to expand the scaleability of Irix, its own version of Unix, and the
I/O performance of the ccNuma architecture. SGI today can support
clusters of up to 128 CPUs, but plans to extend that to 512 processors
for its next-generation ccNUMA architecture, executives said.
Both the MIPS and the Intel processors will play a role in certain
systems, such as SGI's high-end Origin servers. "We can provide this
scaleability on MIPS and IA-64," said Richard Belluzzo, chairman and
chief executive officer of SGI.
SGI announced its first Pentium II-based NT workstations, the 320 and
540, in January, marking its foray into the Wintel world. Over the next
few years, SGI will also work to port Irix to Intel's IA-64 architecture,
which Intel plans to start shipping to OEMs as Merced this year. At
SGI, Merced will be used in Onyx2 systems with the Irix operating
system, and in Octane and O2 systems running both Irix and NT.
Belluzzo said SGI plans to ship its first server based on IA-64 in 2001,
the same year that the R16000 processor is scheduled to appear. SGI
will also continue to support the IA-32 platform for its NT workstations
at the low-end of its product line.
SGI has some important advantages over competitors in the IA-64
realm, Belluzzo said. Hitting on the widespread belief that compiler
technology will make or break future Merced systems, Belluzzo boasted
that SGI has compilers that are "faster than any other company's for
IA-64."
He also referred to SGI's special agreeement with Intel. "Fundamentally,
we are a company based on innovation," Belluzzo said. "Our agreement
with Intel gives us the right to innovate the platform in a way that is not
present with other vendors."
These new architectural improvements will give the company an edge in
its workstation and its server businesses, areas where the company
wants to expand its presence. As part of that strategy, the company has
taken a $75 million equity investment in Wam!net Inc. (Minneapolis),
which has developed an online archiving and communications network
that allows subscribers to share information with customers and
suppliers. Wam!net will in turn buy SGI systems over the next four
years to build its network. SGI has already sold 2,000 servers to
Wam!net, and has 1,000 more on order, said Keith Watson, SGI's
executive vice president in charge of worldwide sales and marketing.
— Additional reporting by Rick Boyd-Merritt |
