Dual Core - The Future of CPU

If you read the articles or press releases about, the latest development of CPUs from various chip manufactors, you will easily notice that they shared a common architectural characteristics: Dual Core.

Here are some dual core chips currently released:

• IBM POWER4 and POWER5 (Oct 2001 / July 2004) - more and more...
• Sun UltraSPARC VI (Feb 2004) - more...
• HP PA8800 (Feb 2004) - more...

And those are planned, announced or even rumored:

• AMD Opteron/Athlon64, codename Toledo (planned H1/H2 2005) - more...
• Intel Pentium 4, codename SmithField (planned mid-2005) - more...
• IBM PowerPC 970 MP (rumored H1 2005 ) - more...
• Motorola PowerPC G4 (rumored H2 2004) - more...
• Intel Itanium, codename Tukwila or Tanglewoord (planned 2005) - more...

In high-end UNIX server market, IBM had been providing dual-core chip in its POWER4 since 2001, while HP and Sun joined the camp in early 2004. Other chip manufacturers including AMD, Intel and Motorola follow the trend and start planning to rollout dual-core chip in the 2nd half of this year the earliest.

But why there are so much manufacturers offering dual-core chips instead of designing single, hyper-speed processor in one piece of silicon? The answer is simple: they all hit problem with heat and power consumption issues using 90nm fabrication process. The chip manufacturers can still boosts the chip's speed by increasing the clock rate, but this result in more heat and higher power consumption. To make the chip run properly in such stiff envirnoment, it required the motherboard be modified to provide more power, and this is the area that the chip maunfacturer out of control.