IBM develops low power, high performance, Processors

New York: IBM has developed a new method of manufacturing low power, high performance microprocessors using a combination of silicon-on-insulator (SOI), strained silicon and copper wiring technologies, a first for the industry.

IBM is putting the technique immediately to work in volume 90 nanometer production at its 300mm manufacturing facility. The company's award-winning 64-bit PowerPC 970FX microprocessor will be the first chip to be built using this trio of IBM technology breakthroughs.

Early PowerPC 970FX chips produced with the new technology deliver significant power savings, while performing at an equal or higher clock speed than comparable processors. The company expects to realise even greater gains in processor efficiency as it ramps up production of the new process technology.

"Our decades-long commitment to pursuing and rapidly implementing technology breakthroughs like SOI and strained silicon is paving the way for a new generation of power savvy chips," said Bernard S. Meyerson, IBM fellow and chief technologist, IBM systems and technology group.

"With this fusion of IBM-pioneered technologies, customers no longer have to sacrifice performance to achieve the power savings they increasingly demand."

Today, chip designers and manufacturers have to meet conflicting goals of trying to increase processing speed and reducing power consumption. In order to achieve one of these goals, chip-makers have to sacrifice or significantly compromise on the other by trading power consumption for performance and vice versa

IBM claims it has conquered this challenge by integrating strained silicon and SOI into the same manufacturing process. This break through speeds the flow of electrons through transistors to increase performance and provide an insulating layer in the silicon that isolates transistors to decrease power consumption.

IBM's versatile new PowerPC 970FX microprocessor is designed for use in a wide array of applications, from desktops to servers to storage and communications products, which require 64-bit performance and/or low power consumption from a microprocessor.

Apple Computers has already announced that it will use the PowerPC 970FX in its powerful new Xserve G5 1U rack-mount server.

The 970FX also takes advantage of another new IBM-refined power saving technique--enabled through sophisticated system-wide tuning and controlling of processor frequency and voltage--which will be detailed in a presentation at the International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco on February 16.

The PowerPC 970FX recently achieved the Microprocessor Report Analysts' Choice Award for Best Desktop Processor, ahead of the Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon 64 FX-51.

Derived from IBM's award-winning POWER4 dual-core microprocessor, the PowerPC 970FX provides users with unrivaled 64-bit computing power, allowing new applications to virtually address an astounding 18 exabytes (18 billion billion bytes) of memory while also running 32-bit applications natively to enable continued use of legacy software as they migrate to 64-bit applications. The design of the 970FX also supports symmetric multi-processing (SMP), allowing systems to be created that link multiple processors to work in tandem for additional processing power.

The PowerPC 970FX uses the same underlying IBM POWER architecture behind families of IBM microprocessors that power products ranging from consumer electronics to supercomputers.