A brand new chip under development by Nano-Engineered Computing Systems Technology could increase processing speeds by a factor of 1000, according to a Rebooting Computing special issue of the IEE Computer journal. This kind of performance is achieved by “integrating processors and memory like floors in a skyscraper and by connecting these components with millions of “vias,” which play the role of tiny electronic elevators,” according to the magazine.

“We have assembled a group of top thinkers and advanced technologies to create a platform that can meet the computing demands of the future,” commented Associate Professor Subhasish Mitra.

Professor H.-S. Philip Wong added: “When you combine higher speed with lower energy use, N3XT systems outperform conventional approaches by a factor of a thousand.”

“There are huge volumes of data that sit within our reach and are relevant to some of society’s most pressing problems from health care to climate change, but we lack the computational horsepower to bring this data to light and use it,” Stanford’s Chris Re said. “As we all hope in the N3XT project, we may have to boost horsepower to solve some of these pressing challenges.”

Of course, this kind of computing knowledge and nomenclature is alien to me, so I don’t have much to say on it. I suppose you can just check out the original report, and see if you can wrest more sense from it than I managed to do, in any case.

This led to questions about defects, since the bigger a chip, the more prone it is to small defects. And one little problem takes down the whole architecture. Interestingly, Microsoft has implemented redundancies in the chip that still makes it operable if one section fails. Senior analyst at the Linley Group Kevin Krewell also stated that chips of such size were created for Nvidia, so they wouldn’t be difficult to manufacture.

The CPU consists of eight 64-bit AMD Jaguar cores, with the CPU consisting of 15 special processors that transfer data at 200 GB per second or more. Apparently, the chips are highly customized on the console and that the GPU is a “DirectX 11.1+” chip (which reflects in the fact that Direct X 11.2 will be heading to the console). Sell stated that, “There’s more than a CPU’s worth of processing in there.”

The console also features 8 GB of shared DRAM (dynamic random access memory), a Blu-ray drive and a 500GB hard disk. The audio subsystem features two dedicated vector cores.

Microsoft engineer Patrick O’Connor then talked about Kinect and how it uses Canesta or “time of flight” technology to measure the duration it takes to light signals to be sent out and then received back, which can then be used to calculate object shapes and the room size. Kinect can apparently 2.5 cm objects, even discerning which way a child’s wrist is facing, and has a 20 ms latency. It can distinguish between six different players, though it takes some time to discern “who” is playing. It also features a 1080p sensor, 70-degree viewing angle and movement detection between 0.8 to 4.2 meters.

As of now there’s still a lot unknown about the console but future conferences will yield more information. The Xbox One will be releasing this November, but in the meantime, check out images of the presentation slides used in the conference (courtesy of Semi-Accurate).

(Source)