There is an interesting "Power Plays" discussion of Intel's focus on low power at Ars Technica.
There is a lot of work going on to optimize current enterprise server designs to use less power, this is good, but its not the order of magnitude difference that a move to Millicomputing based designs would provide.
The most interesting new technology described is an interconnect that uses very low power and which scales its clock rate and power consumption according to the bandwidth demand. This brings variable capacity to the network layer, and I'd love to see some very low power Intel CPUs with this technology integrated.
Showing posts with label interconnect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interconnect. Show all posts
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Millicomputer Module Interconnects
There are two basic approaches.
One is to get modules that have ethernet built-in (or to add ethernet interfaces to a motherboard) and use ethernet switch chips such as the 8-24 port solutions from Vitesse to cluster the modules together. The individual modules would connect at 100Mbit, and the switches and external interfaces would interconnect at 1Gbit. The single chip ethernet switches have lots of features but can be run as unmanaged devices, so there is very little software needed to implement or manage the network. By directly connecting the networks on a motherboard there is no need to drive the full physical ethernet wire standard between the devices, saving a lot of power. These devices cost a few dollars a port, and dissipate about half a watt per port for fully driven gigabit links. if we can avoid using the Ethernet "PHY" (physical driver) a lot more power can be saved.
Another option is to use the built-in high speed USB2.0 interfaces which run at up to 480Mbit/s and connect them to a USB based central router that has ethernet support, then run IP over USB. This is a bit more complex to implement, but could be faster, lower power and cheaper since it uses an interface that is directly built into the millicomputer CPU. There are other kinds of devices like the AMCC PPC440EPx that are more PC-like, and have ethernet, PCI-bus and high speed USB built-in that could be used to implement a board level controller/router/interface. This device is more powerful than the mobile oriented millicomputer CPUs but dissipates about 3W so its in the next bracket up from a power consumption viewpoint.
One is to get modules that have ethernet built-in (or to add ethernet interfaces to a motherboard) and use ethernet switch chips such as the 8-24 port solutions from Vitesse to cluster the modules together. The individual modules would connect at 100Mbit, and the switches and external interfaces would interconnect at 1Gbit. The single chip ethernet switches have lots of features but can be run as unmanaged devices, so there is very little software needed to implement or manage the network. By directly connecting the networks on a motherboard there is no need to drive the full physical ethernet wire standard between the devices, saving a lot of power. These devices cost a few dollars a port, and dissipate about half a watt per port for fully driven gigabit links. if we can avoid using the Ethernet "PHY" (physical driver) a lot more power can be saved.
Another option is to use the built-in high speed USB2.0 interfaces which run at up to 480Mbit/s and connect them to a USB based central router that has ethernet support, then run IP over USB. This is a bit more complex to implement, but could be faster, lower power and cheaper since it uses an interface that is directly built into the millicomputer CPU. There are other kinds of devices like the AMCC PPC440EPx that are more PC-like, and have ethernet, PCI-bus and high speed USB built-in that could be used to implement a board level controller/router/interface. This device is more powerful than the mobile oriented millicomputer CPUs but dissipates about 3W so its in the next bracket up from a power consumption viewpoint.
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