The economy changes the course of chip design at Hot Chips conference

The Hot Chips conference that runs Sunday through Tuesday at Stanford University will capture the evolution of the chip industry. This conference offers the first chance to see how the global economic crisis is affecting the leading edge of the design of semiconductors, which are used in all things electronic and are like the plankton of the digital ecosystem.
One palpable trend is the tough economy’s effect on the conference itself. Last year, over 700 people attended, but so far only about 400 are signed up. The conference is aimed at chip engineers, who are affected by industry cutbacks, overseas oursourcing, and tight travel budgets.
Big iron still dominates, but with attention to low power
While chips often take four years today and aren’t tied to economic ups and downs, the permanent changes in the global economy still have effects in on chip design.
During the dotcom bust, enterprise customers shifted away from “big iron” server chips such as Intel’s Itanium to more power efficient and lower-cost Opteron from Advanced Micro Devices. Intel will have details on its latest version of its Nehalem EX high-end server chips, while AMD will talk about its Magny Cours chips for low-end blade servers. The companies will also talk about the advances in their high-end consumer chips.
Chip makers are still designing “big iron” chips that have the highest performance for the most difficult computing tasks. IBM will unveil Power 7, the next version of its high-performance chips for corporate data centers. Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle, with its own chip programs facing an uncertain future) will describe Rainbow Falls, the code-name for its successor to its Niagara chip, which is a many headed beast that can serve lots of web pages to lots of users at the same time.
All of those chips have all sorts of power-saving features that big iron chips once ignored. Even though this low-power shift started many years ago, it is still propagating its way through the chip industry.
The shift to smaller portable chips continues
One of the biggest new categories beyond big iron is the shift to what we might call “little iron.” Intel will talk about Moorestown, a version of its Atom chip, which is aimed at netbooks (smaller than laptops) and web-browsing gadgets that iIntel calls “mobile Internet devices.”
Intel is also evidently going to talk about the trend toward putting graphics and microprocessors on the same chip. Westmere is Intel’s first 32-nanometer chip that is going into production later this year. It is coupled with a companion graphics chip that could eventually be put onto the same piece of silicon as the microprocessor.
Nvidia will show off the latest in its Ion platform, which provides a graphics boost for high-end netbooks and other small devices.
Parallel computing picks up as a trend
In the past decade, other factors have become just as important as better performance. Those new trends are reflected in the rest of the talks, said Ralph Wittig, one of the organizers of the conference, in an interview.
Parallel computing — or doing lots of things at the same time with multiple processors on a chip — is the subject of multiple talks including the keynote speech by Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of graphics chip maker Nvidia. He will talk about Nvidia’s multi-year crusade to use the parallel computing capabilities of graphics chips to handle chores beyond graphics. The so-called GPU computing (graphics processing unit) trend has taken off in the past couple of years and is starting to see mainstream usage in applications such as fixing flaws in video imagery.
It’s also interesting to see computing spread to other devices. NXP will talk about a chip it designed for liquid-crystal display TVs. NEC and Hitachi will both make presentations about sophisticated processors for car navigation devices, which were once so dumb they would hardly merit papers at a chip design conference.
On Wednesday, Rich Hilleman, chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, will talk about the chip needs of game hardware devices and how games continue to push the leading edge of chip design, as games require more realistic imagery and accurate physics.
Startups aren’t shut out of the chip design game yet
As chip design becomes more expensive, it has become the domain of big companies. But it’s encouraging to see startups on the list of talks. SiTime will talk about its designs for high-speed clocks that are used to keep the split-second pace in chips.
Convey Computer will talk about its design for a high-performance server chip. The company’s hybrid chips feature both standard Intel-based computing capabilities as well as customizable features, giving the chip multiple personalities that can be adapted to a variety of uses.
Nallatech will make a presentation about its “field programmable gate array” or configurable chips that can accelerate apps in supercomputers. And Arches Computing will talk about FPGA technology for high-performance computing hardware that can reconfigure itself for different tasks. And Silicon Blue will also describe an effort to create low-power FPGAs to rival market leaders Xilinx and Altera.