14 DAY TRIAL // The Hot Chips conference may be going about its business, but it looks like the participants are all showing a remarkable lack of any new chips, as well as scarce information on upcoming models.
International trade shows and conferences are usually an occasion where participants unveil the results of their latest research and development efforts.
One of the events currently going on is the Hot Chips conference, where Intel, AMD, Oracle and IBM are all convening to promote their inventions, along with Cisco, Micron, Tilers and various others.
In this particular instance, inventions, one means all sorts of processors, from consumer-oriented CPUs to high-tier, powerful products for the enterprise, even supercomputing market.
Unfortunately, despite what some people may hope for, neither of these players are actually showing off anything new.
Intel will outline some so-called peculiarities of the Sandy Bridge Core processor platform, as well as the Itanium Poulson.
However, it will not go beyond some power management elements of the former 6-core and 8-core units, and a few words on the features of the 12-wide issue 8-core Itanium (like the better Hyper Threading).
Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices will discuss the Fusion A-Series APUs (accelerated processing units), otherwise known as Llano, although the Bulldozer x86-64 desktop, server and workstation chip architecture will get some attention as well.
In fact, it is possible that some actual specifications of the latter will be published, though this is just speculation at this point.
International Business Machines should also be around at the summit, with data on the PowerPC A2 64-bit 16-core chips. This particular item is scheduled for 2012 release (will serve in IBM petascale supercomputers) and supports 4-way simultaneous multi-threading.
As for Oracle, the SPARC T4 “highly-threaded server-on-a-chip with native support for heterogeneous computing” will get its 8-core design somewhat better described.