IBM warms to heat maps, Intel cools Montecito

SAN FRANCISCO -- If there has been one common thread to statements from chip designers at ferocious competitors such as IBM and Intel, it's the need for more power-conscious processors heading into the second half of the decade. At the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco, both companies released further details on their work to reduce the power, and therefore the heat, used by future chips.

IBM thinks it has found a way to improve the predictability of heat dissipation from its chips with a new technique that allows it to precisely identify hot spots on a working chip, researchers said in a presentation Sunday evening. And the next version of Intel's Itanium 2 processor for high-end servers, Montecito, will consume less power than its predecessor, despite the addition of a second processing core and faster clock speeds, the company said Tuesday.

IBM and Intel are two of the pre-eminent chip companies presenting at ISSCC, which gathers some of the brightest minds in chip design to review the progress of their peers.

Several advances detailed at the conference are far-off research projects that have little relevance to average users, such as a project presented Monday that strives to connect silicon chips with snail neurons. But IBM, Intel and the rest of the industry's work on reducing power is becoming more and more important to IT managers struggling to cool large racks of servers or notebook users hoping to lighten their loads.

IBM has developed an infrared heatsink that it can use to map the heat dissipation of a processor while it is fully operational, said Hendrik Hamman, manager for photonics and thermal systems at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York. A heatsink is used to quickly remove excess heat from a processor to prevent it from shutting down.

Previous attempts at measuring heat dissipation involved taking static readings from a limited number of heat sensors placed on the chip, he said. The new heatsink allows IBM to measure the power consumption, and heat dissipation, of sections of a chip as its workload changes with different application tasks, he said.

The idea is to allow IBM to build models based on the data collected by its heatsink, and to use that data to design future processors and cooling strategies that anticipate shifts in heat based on the chip's workload, Hamman said. The company can also change the supply power.

"For every workload, there's going to be a specific power distribution," Hamman said. Previous attempts at building heat maps were just snapshots in time that didn't accurately reflect changing workloads or cooling strategies, he said.

IBM's infrared heatsink can be used on just about any processor to produce real-time maps of heat dissipation, Hamman said.

Intel's abrupt departure from its desktop processor road map last year was evidence of how important power consumption and heat have become in the PC market. The company canceled future high-speed Pentium 4 chips, which would have required significant engineering to work around the excessive heat produced by clock speeds above 4GHz.

The server market has been less concerned with power consumption historically, but that is changing as IT managers are hit with rising bills for electricity and cooling systems in their data centers.