Vol 19, Issue 26

June 27, 2005

Best of Spring Processor Forum '05

By Kevin Krewell

We recently completed our first Spring Processor Forum (successor to the Embedded Processor Forum) at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, California. The new location was quite a hit. We packed 31 presentations into two full days, perhaps a bit too full. We tried an experiment by running two sessions in parallel to form two tracks. Unfortunately, a number of people wanted to attend both sessions and couldn't. We'll fix that at the Fall Forum.

As I mentioned in my previous editorial, the keynote by Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, followed up on my earlier editorial on Moore's law, and it was quite a hit with many audience members. On the second day of the Forum, we had a special presentation on the Cell processor by Jim Kahle of IBM. Kahle made a special effort by flying up from the PlayStation 3 launch event at the E3 trade in Los Angeles to show how the Cell processor can be used and announced IBM's plan to open the architecture by releasing an open-source tool chain and simulator. The Cell processor continues to excite the engineering community with its unique approach to computational performance, and Kahle's presentation received the most positive reviews of the Forum. Based on audience feedback, Kahle's Cell presentation was "best of show."

The ongoing theme that touches almost all processor designs today is multicore processing. Part of the appeal of the Cell processor is the approach the team from IBM, Sony, and Toshiba has taken to aggressive multiprocessing.

We also got to see the first public demonstration of the XLR processor from Raza Microelectronics and the revelation of the first superscalar, out-of-order ARM core from Marvell. And as I mentioned in my previous editorial, multicore design will be the theme for our Fall Processor Forum, and we're planning to move beyond chip and core introductions to explore all aspects of multicore design, including software.

Apple Redux

I have to eat some crow after my last editorial, as it was revealed at Apple's developer conference that the company will indeed move to Intel processors. Complete in-depth coverage appears in this issue. (See MPR 6/27/05-01, "Apple Drops PowerPC for Pentium.") The move is a calculated risk for Apple and a setback for the PowerPC. The winner in this is clearly Intel, but the short-term impact on IBM and Freescale is minor. Intel gains an additional customer it didn't have before and locks up the personal computer business. Intel also gains a relationship with a company that can challenge Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop as well as a partner with good connections to media companies and for developing digital rights management for PCs.

For IBM, Apple's move is an embarrassment, and that company loses a partner that helped advance the PowerPC architecture (not to mention, Apple was the original impetus for creating the PowerPC). But IBM still has the opportunity to sell perhaps one hundred times the potential Apple volume with the game consoles from Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. Freescale had already focused its PowerPC processors on the embedded market a few years ago.

The mistake I made was in thinking about the Apple/PowerPC relationship as an engineering problem when it was actually a purely business decision. There were no technical barriers to developing the PowerPC processor for Apple's needs, just economic barriers. In the end, the business was not valuable enough for IBM to expend its limited resources to maintain it.

Lessons From Formula 1 Racing

I had the unique opportunity to attend the U.S. Grand Prix in Indianapolis on June 19, 2005, as a guest of AMD. The race turned out to be not much of a race, but it did provide a good lesson in supply-chain and vendor selection.

Only two companies supplied tires for the all the Formula 1 (F1) race cars: Bridgestone and Michelin. Most of the teams (seven out of ten) in the race were running on Michelin tires and had done well with the tires up to this race. In the first practice run on Friday, the Toyota team experienced two tire failures, one of which led to a spectacular crash into a wall for driver Rolf Schumacher. (He was shaken up, but not injured.) The reason for the crash was found to be failure of the Michelin tires in a particularly high g-force turn.

This accident was a serious failure for Michelin's race program and a problem not just for Toyota but for every team running on Michelin tires. For each racetrack, the race teams and tire companies configure the cars and tires for the desired results. Each team spends millions of dollars on computer simulations and wind-tunnel tests. Even with this extensive development program, the cars and tires are so finely tuned that it's nearly impossible to make a significant change a couple of days before the race. While Bridgestone engineers analyzed the failure, the Michelin-equipped teams tried to convince the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile or FIA (the race-sanctioning body) to find a way to let them run. Even after extensive negotiations and a request for a chicane (road barrier) to slow the cars in one critical turn where the Michelin tires failed, in the end they could not find a solution that would be safe and that met FIA rules. The end result was that after the first parade lap of the race, all the cars with Michelin tires retired to the pits and quit the race. The remaining six cars, from the three teams that were running the Bridgestone tires, continued to race, leading to a first- and second-place finish for the Ferrari team.

The teams running on Michelin tires lost a valuable opportunity to score points toward the season championship, and they wasted all the time and money preparing for the race. The fans lost most of all: many had traveled from all over the world to see their favorite drivers and teams compete, and most were sadly disappointed. Michelin may have also lost the confidence of the drivers and teams. Michelin was considered the faster tire, but now the teams will have to consider how much they can trust a critical component on their car. This is a serious challenge for Michelin: to find the reason the tires were not properly designed and constructed for the fast Indy track and to regain the confidence of the teams and drivers. It is very difficult, if not contractually impossible, for the teams to switch tire suppliers midseason, much less just before a race. The F1 racing sport has become so complex that relying on multiple suppliers is not an option.

In just three days, Michelin went from being the dominant supplier to a position in which it must go into damage control to save its reputation and the F1 business. Yesterday's hero can be tomorrow's goat. Picking the correct supplier for Ferrari meant standing on the winner's podium while the other teams were packing up and catching the next plane out of Indianapolis. So sometimes the fastest doesn't win the race.

The other instructional lesson is that computer simulations are not yet good enough to completely model the real world. Even simulations run on supercomputers are still not the real thing.

The Passing of a Legend

It is with considerable sadness that we heard that one of the true founders of the semiconductor industry, Jack S. Kilby, passed away on June 20, 2005 at age 81. In 1958, while at Texas Instruments, Kilby created the first integrated circuit design. Kilby received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for his work on the integrated circuit and had more than 60 patents over his career. Kilby's work, and the work of Robert Noyce at Fairchild, laid the foundation for the modern electronics business.