IBM will bring multithreading--a technology that lets one processor act like two or more--to its Power5 server chip, the company said Tuesday, as a revolution in microprocessor design continues. Simultaneous multithreading essentially allows a chip to run two applications, or two "threads" of the same application, at the same time--thereby reducing the time it requires to complete a task. "We're seeing on the order of 40 percent (in performance improvement) being pretty common" in lab tests, Joel Tendler, director of technology assessment in IBM's systems group, said on Tuesday at Hot Chips, a semiconductor design conference taking place this week at Stanford University.

Big Blue presented a paper on its Power5 chips for servers at the conference. The Armonk, N.Y.-based company said it has samples of the chip running in its labs and has booted its AIX and OS/400 operating systems and the Linux operating system on it. The chip is scheduled to come out commercially in 2004. Multithreading and multicore chips have moved to the forefront of chip design, as engineers have wrestled with ways to boost chip performance without drastically increasing energy consumption. When the decade began, energy consumption--which can drive up operating costs of systems and create problems with heat dissipation and signaling--was largely overlooked in processor design.



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