Transistors

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Transistors considered by many to be one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century. In recent years the size of transistor used in microprocessor decreased drastically and made it very compact. By 1991, transistors were already smaller than bacteria. By the 370-nm generation, transistors were smaller than the wavelength of ordinary light. You cannot see these transistors with an optical microscope. This year, companies will build chips with 90-nm transistors. That's twice the size of a virus. At 90 nm, 100,000 transistors fit on a small grain of sand! That's why big chips have hundreds of millions of transistors.

Processor frequency Trend

One of the trends in processor design is the processor frequency trend. Early processor was operating on very low frequency but processor designed in recent year is operating on very high frequency. The following graph shows the frequency doubles at each generation and number of gates per clock reduces by 25%.

Processor Power Trend

The power dissipation of modern processors has been rapidly increasing along with increasing transistor count and clock frequencies. At the same time, there is a growing disparity between the maximum power consumption of a processor and the "typical" power consumed by that processor; i.e., power consumed while running typical applications. This trend is the result of the significant increase in transistor count required to reach the desired peak performance targets.

Bus Bandwidth Trend

Memory and I/O Bandwidth are essential for high performance so it obvious to increase the size of bus because today's application and software require high amount of memory and large calculation so to mingle with the today's application we require bus of higher bandwidth. The following graph shows trend in bus bandwidth.

Multiple Levels of Parallelism

Today's processor provides the ability to exploit parallelism at many levels - at the data word level through SIMD instructions, at the instruction level through multiple functional units per processor, at the thread-of-execution level through support for multithreaded software, and at the system level through its intrinsic support for "MPs-on-a-chip" (multiple processor units per implementation).

Virtualization

Virtualization isn't new, but few PC users are familiar with the concept because it premiered on the huge research mainframes of yesteryear and on RISC servers rather than x86 platforms. Basically, it enables users to run multiple operating systems (or instances of the same OS) on a single computer and switch between operating systems on the fly. Conceptually, virtualization really enables the user or any IT infrastructure to separate the hardware from the software in a logical format, traditionally; we've had a very one-to-one relationship between the hardware and the operating system. Virtualization allows us to have a one-to-many relationship between the hardware and operating systems. Operating systems are totally separate and mutually exclusive from one another, sitting on one piece of hardware." Both AMD and Intel are putting big bets on virtualization as a CPU technology -- one that ultimately could deliver some major changes in how our home and business PCs work.

MAJC Design Architecture

MAJC (Microprocessor Architecture for Java Computing) is radically new microprocessor architecture from the innovators at Sun Microsystems. The MAJC architecture is designed to meet the need for wire speed processing power demanded by on-line multimedia applications, wideband telecommunication networks, e-commerce, and a host of media-rich networked applications. The UltraSPARC T2 processor5 is the implementing MAJC design Architecture which integrating all the key functions of a server on a single chip: computing, networking, security, and input/output (I/O).

Features of Microprocessor with MAJC Design Architecture:-