About the chip in your laptop and smart phone

What powers the smart phone revolution

Smart phones are undoubtedly the largest mass consumed tech-products in the world today. According to technology research firm Gartner, nearly 428 million units of smart phones were sold worldwide in third quarter of 2012 alone. Why so big a number? First, smart phones are extremely useful; second, they dont burn a hole in your pocket (given, of course, you choose the right one for your budget!). With a market so big, it is expected that the firms selling these smart phones want to capture as large a part of it as possible. After all, the semiconductor industry which supplies the brains (read integrated chips) for these phones is based on volumes. Their tools are extremely, extremely expensive. To offset the manufacturing cost and sell their products at low prices they must have large volumes. And the products, of course, must be competitive. Being competitive means faster phones which consume as low power as possible and in a small form factor. Over the last 50 years, the semiconductor companies have been delivering this for computers; indeed, todays smart phone can be considered to be a computer which can make calls. This is captured in a beautiful empirical law, called the Moores law, which the chip makers work so hard to follow. It states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18-24 months. This is done by making every length on the chip 0.7 times the previous generation (think gate length 90nm65nm45nm28nm). This translates into a 50 percent decrease in area for every component, enabling the chip makers to pack more transistors into the same area while at the same time reducing power consumption (for instance, Intels 22nm Atom chips for mobile platform, likely to be launched in 2013, will consume 30 percent less power than its 32 predecessors at the transistor level). More transistors mean more functionality. With the decrease in length, a number of other parameters are also scaled. One of them is the clock frequency, which increased steadily from 740 kHz of Intels first microprocessor 4004 (circa 1973); modern processors go anywhere from 1 GHz to about 4 GHz (2005). Most people know that higher the clock speed, faster is the processor (strictly speaking, thats true only for the same family of processors). Going from one technology node (drawn gate length of a transistor: 45nm, 28 nm, etc.) to another, increasing the clock rate is a sure shot way to increase performance since instructions are executed quicker. Well, one of the modern mysteries about computers is that since 2005 there has not been any significant increase in the clock frequency at all. Why should that be so? And more importantly perhaps, how has the performance of the computers and smart phones continued to improve?

It turns out that increasing clock frequency increases power consumption of the device. In fact, it scales proportionally with it. Increased power consumption heats up the device, which leads to even more power dissipation in the form of increased saturation currents through the devices. If the trend to increase clock frequency had continued, by now some parts of the chip would be as hot as the Suns surface!

Clearly, such an increase was not sustainable, so engineers found other ways to increase the performance of the chip.

One of most prominent and widely employed alternative is to use more than one processor in the same system. This idea exploited by having multiple processor cores on the same die (A die is a small piece of semiconductor material on which a functional circuit is fabricated). With a multi core processor, with each core running independent of the other, more than one task can be in the execution at the same time. Effectively, in each clock, twice the amount of work can be done by a dual core processor than a single core processor. Thus operating two cores at a smaller frequency gives the same benefits as increasing the clock frequency. Now you must be asking, if I use two cores instead of one, wouldnt I burn more power? Well, yes, as compared to a single core processor running at the same frequency. No, if the frequency of the dual core processor is lower. This stems from the fact that a larger voltage is required to support higher frequencies, while the power dissipation increases as a square of voltage. (See figure x)

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This however, does not mean one can indiscriminately increase the number of cores. One way to see the problem is to realize that these two cores are not completely independent. The tasks which these cores perform are often dependent on each other. Also, there are overheads associated with distributing the tasks between the cores and ensuring coherency with other sub systems of a computer, most prominently the memory. The crux of the matter is that to exploit multiple cores, there must be parallel instructions. If we have a task which is divided into instructions which must be performed sequentially, then having multiple cores does not improve the performance. Only those applications which make extensive use of parallel instructions benefit from multiple cores. But software parallelism is one of the toughest challenges in computing in general for which no general purpose solution in terms of productivity has been found yet.

In the current scenario, thus, the number of such applications is limited. Video games are CPU and GPU intensive where parallelism is naturally expected, but in this case, the research has focused primarily on improving the GPU since it is easier than parallelizing complex game engines. Other examples are CAD tools and multimedia applications like video encoding. On the other hand, web data centers and scientific computing are natural applications where the effort of software parallelization is justified. Recent studies, such as one by ST Ericsson, have shown that over the last decade most demanding games, office application, web browsing and multimedia playback make good use of only two processors only. Rest cores are not utilized to the optimum, and thus performance gain is not as drastic as expected. (See figure x2) So why should you care about all of this? The answer is to appreciate the fact that more cores dont necessarily mean better performance. Right now the dual core processor is the king in the smart phone market. And they indeed much superior to single core CPUs. But when the quad core processors for smart phones are launched, dont hasten to buy them, since they might not be as good you expect them.