Three hundred odd people at Intel India have just won a bet with their management and earned themselves a ?fascinating vacation?. But they are clearly more excited about what they have delivered?end-to-end design of Intel?s first six-core or six brain microprocessor.
It is hard to miss the glint in Intel India president, Praveen Vishakantaiah?s eyes as he counts the long list of firsts. ?This is the first time that a microprocessor came to life in a lab in India. Intel had never taken work on 45-nanometre technology outside the US till now. It is also the first time that a chip has been launched on the first design iteration at Intel. I am incredibly proud of the team that delivered India?s first ever microprocessor design.?
The snazzy microprocessor packs 1.9 billion transistors and is smaller than a matchbox. It is expected to strengthen Intel?s position in the highly competitive market of servers oriented at large enterprises. Till now, both Intel and AMD have two and four core chips.
The project came to India about two years ago and finished two months ahead of the schedule. Intel design prowess story, however, goes back to another India-specific project Whitefield, which was aborted three years back to design next-generation Xeon processor for servers. Disappointment was short-lived as the same Bangalore team was assigned the task of designing the six core Xeon processor. It was codenamed Dunnington because it was Dunn (done) in garden town (Bangalore).
The Intel India team planned and executed the complete design activities, including front-end design, pre-silicon logic validation and back-end design. The post-silicon validation, which tests the market readiness and the product-performance, was also undertaken at Intel?s Bangalore facility. The project was broadly divided into sketching a design and then optimising the design to meet all performance and cost targets and finally, a complete simulation of the design.
Praveen, who led the design team, says three steps had to be followed in every phase. First, the design was represented in a high-level language. Next, this was translated into circuits and finally, layout design was readied to send mask to the factory. The first design was completed last year on August 15 coinciding with India completing 60 years of Independence.
And the new six-brain chip has already prompted a debate over the potential threat to high-end offerings in the market for servers suitable for handling intensive enterprise applications such as databases, business intelligence, ERP and server planning. ?The six core chip delivers 50% more performance than its quad core predecessor while using 10% less electric power, says R Ravichandran, director (sales), Intel South Asia. It is designed for the multiprocessor market, meaning servers with four to 16 processor sockets. These multi-core chips basically allow computers to allocate tasks simultaneously instead of having a singe powerful processor to handle a job in a linear style from start to finish.
Hardly surprising that other semiconductor companies are chasing Praveen to understand what went into the designing of the new chip. ?Within six years of inception of the India design centre, it has rolled out a chip from design to tape out. This is the fastest ramp up in the history of Intel,? insists Praveen. Besides the six-core microprocessor, the 2,500 strong R&D team in Bangalore has made important contributions to the world?s first programmable processor delivering teraflops of performance, quad-core Xeon processor and Centrino mobile platforms.
Many more are likely to follow at the development centres of Intel and other semiconductor companies. Few other semiconductor majors like ST Microelectronics and FreeScale have also unveiled their complete made in India chips, though Intel insists Dunnington is the first complex microprocessor that was born in India. Analysts like iSuppli are predicting that India could end up doing half the world?s chip design.
Insiders feel we first need to make research more attractive. ?When companies like Intel offer Rs 5 lakh to those with masters degree, why should people opt for scholarship of Rs 30,000 or so,? Praveen rationalises. Intel claims to be close to finalising a model that will make research more attractive, though it is keeping the details under wraps for now. There are other leadership challenges too. ?People here are very aggressive and have high expectations. If they have worked on an idea for six months, they think they can walk on water,? he agrees.
At Intel, however, the development team seems permanently etched on its R&D map. And before Dunnington developers can proceed on the vacation they have just won, they are already onto their new challenge and are working on the next generation server technologies.