Accelerating Innovation in Cloud & Mobile Computing

Grazed from EEJournal. Author: Bruce Kleinman.

The 1980s witnessed a “golden age” of the computer. While the commercially successful x86 architecture continued to evolve at the microarchitecture level, completely new architectures and instruction sets innovated rapidly and set the stage for intense competition. RISC concepts were refined and expanded in the MIPS, Sparc, Power, PA-RISC and Alpha (to name a few) architectures with great success.

In short, there was a lot of Darwinian action taking place. Interesting in retrospect, the vast majority of these architectures focused on workstation CPUs: by and large, the architectures were optimized for compute horsepower with a focus on integer and floating-point performance. The race was on to build faster and faster compute engines…

Workstations are still with us, but the vast bulk of heavy compute lifting is now performed on server farms. Simulation, place & route, DRC, DFM – as well as such diverse applications as commercial animation – can literally use as much compute power as you can throw at them. They populate racks of servers loaded with the most powerful CPUs available. These compute jobs can easily take tens of hours, so any efficiency gains directly translate into meaningful productivity gains. And this class of compute job wants a workstation CPU: blazing fast integer and floating-point pipelines coupled with a sophisticated memory hierarchy to keep those pipelines humming…

Read more from the source @ http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20140313-innovation/

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