Texas Instruments claimed yesterday that the microprocessor roadmap unveiled by the Semiconductor Industry Association last month is too conservative (CI No 3,797). The SIA reckons that by 2014 processors will be running at 3.5GHZ, but by 2010 TI says it expects to produce parts that will certainly be able to deliver 1 trillion instructions per second (TIPS), and may conceivably reach 3 TIPS.
The Dallas company made its claims at the International Electron Devices meeting in Washington DC, where the company’s senior fellow and business development manager Gene Frantz, unveiled TI’s own digital signal processor roadmap, predicting performance ceilings 15 times higher than today’s by 2005, and 230 times higher by 2010. Today, TI’s top performing C6000 devices deliver 2,400 MIPS, an increase of 240% in just two years,
According to Jean-Marc Charpentier, TI’s European marketing manager for DSP products, the company expects the rate of its high-end performance increases to continue to accelerate, while it also drives down the power consumption/power out put ratios of devices destined for mobile and handheld applications. In the second half of 2001, he said, TI will begin shipping 300mm wafers manufactured using the company’s 0.1 micron process from its DMOS 6 fab in Dallas, which will dramatically increase the scale of integration open to the company. And before then, he said the company plans to begin sampling a new C6000 series part with a clock speed of 300MHz, and VLIW architecture capable of executing eight instructions in each processor cycle.
The combination of consistently faster clock speeds, increases in the number of instructions executed per cycle thanks to VLIW and reductions in geometry which will enable multiple processors cores to be loaded on a single device will each contribute to TI’s aggressive performance predictions, Charpentier said. At the same time, the company plans to make all these technologies available for exploitation by customers using a common tool set. Everything we produce in future will be compatible with our existing toolset, he said.
