More Chip Stories To Watch

Top 10 Chip Stories to Watch in 2008

Taking Advantage of Multiple Cores: "You can't afford for the software tools to lag behind [processor development] for three years. When you get to Nehalem, you're talking one to eight cores and one to 16 threads. And we have the software development tools to build on. There are so many people tired of waiting to take advantage of a great product, who love the instruction set, but there's not a compiler yet to take advantage." -- Steve Dallman, Intel

"Will industry applications and communications stacks, i.e. TCP, evolve to benefit from multi-core designs available in the market? New designs like our Fabric Computing Architecture product LiquidIQ, which provides dedicated communications pipes to each core, could be one answer. New dev tools that help existing codes take advantage of multi-core architectures may help." -- Keith Millar, Liquid Computing

"I think there's going to be a bit of 'anti-news' on quad-core, so to speak. Given the state of where AMD is at and where Intel's at, it's going to turn out that quad-core doesn't happen [in 2008]. Oh, it will occupy the top-end of the market, but I that think dual-core is going to be around for a while." -- Dean McCarron, Mercury Research

Hardware Shortages: "We've got four 45nm fabs scheduled to come on line. Those meet the CPU demand, but the question is are there enough raw materials in the world to meet this demand? We look at that a lot, and scratch our heads and worry. But we invest in companies like Micron to ensure the supply of DDR memory. On the other hand, some of the system builders say it's been hard to get hard drives lately." -- Dallman

"We've seen unprecedented growth in the market, the most since early '90s. If those growth rates continue, we've got the PC market entering a new era. And if maintained through second half of '08, we'll be routinely reading shortage stories. 2008 will be interesting from the sheer point of building PCs and supplies." -- McCarron

Memory: "Will memory bandwidth keep pace with cores? As the number of cores increase, the load on the shared memory bus increases. Processors will need to balance the 'core to memory bandwidth' ratio to suit the state of target applications. Cache size and cache architectures will play a critical role." -- Millar

"Memory is going to become increasingly important. DRAM is something everybody uses, but Microsoft Vista is going to need more of it, meaning price becomes a factor. Flash memory is a factor. Memory is getting more important to system builders, to people out in the channel. They're involved in memory decisions. What combinations do you put in the system?" -- Shane Rau, IDC

Hi-Def Video: "The entire video content creation process is going to flip to Hi-Def in 2008. People are going to start with Hi-Def and de-res it to standard def if they need to. The whole Blu-ray versus HD DVD thing will be solved by dual players, but when it comes to cable providers like Comcast and the satellite guys, if you're making commercials, movies or whatever, it's going to come over the pipe in Hi-Def. We'll even see HD-capable handsets coming out." -- Patrick Moorhead, AMD

"Video is a different beast than graphics. It'll be one to watch for because of penetration of blue laser drives on PCs. The silicon vendors are engaged in trying to enable it in PCs. Core logic vendors and video vendors are doing it." -- Rau

Accelorators: "Is 2008 the year of accelerators? Examples include FPGA processors, Cell processors and Nvidia's Tesla. The industry has been sniffing around this issue for years. Intel's QuickAssist and AMD's Torrenza initiatives are vying for the industry standard." -- Millar

Vista versus XP:"Will Microsoft extend the end-of-life for system builders on XP? They extended the OEMs already. They were supposed to end-of-life XP for OEMs in Feb. 2009, but they extended it six months. Hey, our attach rates are 12 percent on Vista. In the broad channel, it's like 5 percent. What happens if Vista doesn't take off?" -- Joe Toste, Equus Computer Systems

WiMAX: "It's going to be pretty exciting. I don't know how much it's going to add to the world's revenue, but it'll be exciting. We've all seen cities tyring to put WiFi in and it not working out. And for system builders, as the infrastructure comes into place, it's going to be a bonanza." -- Dallman