ISSCC 2006: Sony's Ken Kutaragi recounts the emergence of supercompute gaming ...
February 14, 2006
Kutaragi started with a short review of computing and computer games, from Eniac, through microprocessors and text-based games, to Pong, and now approaching real-time computer generated graphics. He said he foresees this trend continuing, expanding the market from homes and fixed-location gaming, to the mobile space. This trend will increase IC content and push the limits of the semiconductor processes. In the early games, Kutaragi said the game platforms used mature technologies like TTL, so the internal silicon was always one or two generations back from the leading edge. The gaming market was fairly small and most games were just advanced toys. Designs were integrated into ASICs to reduce costs and size, but there was no effort to push the technology. By 1994, the games were just starting to move to 0.5-micron processes, while the leading process was 0.35 micron. Eventually over time, the game chips migrated to smaller processes to increase integration and reduce costs. Now games are a big business, Kutaragi said. Over 700 million gaming platforms are in players' hands, and the industry consumes 70,000 8-inch wafers per month for logic and memory – with demand predicted to increase in 2007 to over 120,000 8-and 12-inch wafers per month. He added that the latest games are multi-core SoC devices that push the state of the art in semiconductors. The Playstation became one of the first gaming systems to push the technology, according to Kutaragi. He went on to recount the history of the product. It is similar in architecture to a PC, except for its MIPS processor and dedicated geometry transfer engine. Due to the 5-stage pipeline in the graphics chip, the latency approached 100 mS – a speed that humans discern as discontinuous and definitely not real time. To address the latency issue, Sony developed the emotion engine in 1998. This groundbreaking graphics chip needed the latest technologies to achieve its performance and level of integration. By reducing the number of pipeline stages and increasing integration – with 10.5 million transistor and a 128-bit dual vector processor – the Playstation pushed all of the existing limits of the 250-nanometer process. In 1999, the design was ported to a 4-metal, 180-nanometer process to reduce size and increase performance. The following year, it was ported to a 130-nanometer process. The 2-chip set was reduced to a single chip in a 90-nanometer process in 2004. Also in 2004, the portable PSP platform was introduced. This gaming system uses a 9-metal, 90-nanometer process and has 18 million transistors in a multi-core architecture. Kutaragi said the advent of real-time response in games will change the entire experience. Just as computers changed lives by bringing new compute capabilities to the office – first through spreadsheets, then communications and publishing, and finally to the rest of the high-technology lifestyle through video and music – the new games will bring other changes. Real-time response will now allows the user to interact more closely with the games. The absence of any noticeable lag immerses the user in the action. The need for more computing and massive I/O capabilities is acknowledged in any real-time situation. For example, a Formula 1 car has over 200 sensors and needs a supercomputer to process the data in the time available. Other real-time applications have similar requirements. The real-time environment forces the computer designer to change from a storage-centric to a processing centric model, with low latency and high throughput as essential design characteristics. Kutaragi noted that the latest chip for game machines (and recently announced blade servers from IBM) is the Cell chip. It is a very highly parallel, multi-core processor with massive bandwidth for memory and I/O. Among the new capabilities in the chip are internal hardware security functions and an architecture geared for high scalability. The Cell chip represents the convergence of supercomputers and computer entertainment in massively parallel systems with real-time response, Kutaragi noted. We are quickly approaching the prospect of a super artificial intelligence that includes vision systems, intelligence – and even curiosity, as we saw in HAL in the film 2001. Next-generation systems will include vast number of sensors of all types to change the way humans and computers interact. Kutaragi concluded by saying that game machines have gone from trailing-edge components to leading-edge SoC devices over the past 30 years. He predicted that the future of real-time computing will include massive assemblies of parallel processors over mesh-connected networks to execute the vast amounts of computation that recognize and react to the real world. The enhanced capabilities of the supercomputer-class devices will change user experiences and expectations in ways we are not fully able to define, at least for now. ******************************** EDA industry observer Tets Maniwa can be reached at maniwa_at_sbcglobal.net
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