Elmer - Re: "Suffice to say the die is VERY BIG. Few companies but Intel could yield any good die"
Speaking of BIG DIE, did you catch the die size of the UltraSPARC III - described in these abstracts ?
It is 370 sq. mm. !!! And it runs at only 600 MHz, burning 80 watts !
My guess is that the Merced is larger, but the Merced is SAMPLING - while UltraSparc III is almost 2 years late !
Paul
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SESSION WP 25
SALON 9, Wed, 9
1:30 PM
NEXT-GENERATION MICROPROCESSORS
Chair: S. Naffziger, Hewlett Packard, Fort Collins, CO
Associate Chair: A. Scherer, Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, CA
25.1 The Architecture of a 3rd Generation 64b SPARC Microprocessor 1:30 PM
M. Boffey, J. Chamdani, D. Chen, D. Chiacchia, D. Greenley,
K. Holdbrook, B. Keish, G. Lauterbach, A. Leung, H. Lopez,
W. Lynch, R. Melanson, C. Narasimhaiah, J. Petolino, L. Quach,
K. Tam, K. Yau
Sun Microsystems, Palo Alto, CA
A third-generation 600MHz quad-issue 64b SPARC microprocessor for desktop workstations, work-group server and enterprise server platforms includes on-chip 64kB 4-way associative data cache, 32kB 4-way associative instruction cache, 2kB 4-way associative prefetch cache and 2kB 4-way associative write-cache. The chip uses a 0.18 um 7-layer metal process with 23M transistors.The chip consumption <80W from 1.8V.
25.2 Implementation of a 3rd-Generation SPARC
V9 64b Microprocessor 2:00 PM
K. Aingaran, M. Ang, M. Boland, A. Das, P. Dixit, G. Gouldsberry,
J. Hart, R. Heald, T. Horel, W.-J. Hsu, J. Kaku, C. Kim, E. Kim, S. Kim, F. Klass, H. Kwan, R. Lo, H. McIntyre, A. Mehta, D. Murata, S. Nguyen, Y-P. Pai, S. Patel, K. Shin, S. Vishwanthaiah, G. Yee, H. You
Sun Microsystems Inc., Palo Alto, CA
Performance of a third-generation superscalar SPARC V9 processor is improved over previous processors by increasing clock frequency and by improvements in the on-chip memory system. The chip operates at 600MHz, dissipates <80W from a 1.8V supply and contains 23M transistors (12M in RAMs) on a 370mm 2 die. |
