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Annual conference mirrors industry's swing away from general-purpose processors
San Mateo, Calif. - The recession's toll notwithstanding, the upcoming 15th annual hot Chips conference drew a near-record number of paper submissions. But the scheduled lineup shows that hot Chips, like the industry it examines, has distinctly changed its flavor.
"The focus in design now is on applications and their solutions, not on general-purpose CPUs for everything," said Pradeep Dubey, manager of innovative platform architecture at Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) and program co-chairman for the conference, which will convene Aug. 17-19 on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif.
Hot Chips traditionally has been a showcase for general-purpose CPU microarchitecture. When clock speed became king in the early 1990s, the conference documented the rise of simplified, pipelined processors that could exploit the rapidly shrinking gate delays of CMOS processes. Later, as CMOS transistor budgets rose faster than logic speeds, Hot Chips papers reported on the emergence of superscalar architectures, branch prediction, speculative execution and threading support.
But all of those advances were documented in the context of general-purpose microprocessors.
"There was a group in the architecture world that felt that if we could make the CPUs fast enough, they could be used for anything," Dubey said.
This year's program reflects a different reality. While leading-edge processors-and, now, supercomputers-still incubate architectural ideas, it is the application of the ideas to particular problems that distinguishes the really hot chips.
Reflecting that evolution, the 2003 program of papers will be bookended by sessions on the sources of underlying technology: supercomputers on Monday morning, Aug. 18, and microprocessors on Tuesday afternoon. In between, the floor will be given to...