IBM Announces Chip Morphing Technology 118
An anonymous reader writes "IBM has announced that it is now capable of producing self-healing chips. From the article: 'eFUSE works by combining software algorithms and microscopic electrical fuses, opposed to laser fuses, to produce chips that can regulate and adapt their own actions in response to changing conditions and system demands.' It goes on to say that the IBM system is more robust than previous methods, and that the chips are already in production. The future is here!"
Overclocking made safer. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Overclocking made safer. (Score:1)
Kinda reminds me of the remote control automotive screws discussion. Overheat a chip, destroy its ability to heal itself too, perhaps? D'oh!
Re:Overclocking made safer. (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading their article, the big improvement is the leg has no chance to grow back.
Sounds like total spin to claim that descruction of circuits is a healing process. I smell DRM all over this.
Re:Overclocking made safer. (Score:2, Insightful)
Using fuses seems best suited for small runs where your design is pretty fixed and you don't want to foot the bill for a custom chip mask. Like programmable logic arrays, etc...
So if conditions change with the environment these chips are in, they blow some fuses to respond. If conditions change back to where they were before the chip blew fuses, oh well. Some sort of nonviolate ram seems more in order for "adaptive" technology, heck regular PC cmos adapts handily to new hard disks for instance.
Re:Overclocking made safer. (Score:2)
So DRM smells like fried electronics?
Maybe (Score:2)
I doubt that DRM would be a driving factor, but I could see where a software security vulnerability might be exploitable to cause damage to the CPU.
I could also see where a kernelmode DRM driver might seek to destroy CPU's used to rip CD's etc without permission... Many questions arise from this and how technology and content providers will reach a compromise. My own personal view is that such a compromise is becoming less and less possible.
I think
Re:Maybe (Score:2)
Why does my computer keep writing "It's just a flesh wound" across the screen?
Re:Overclocking made safer. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Overclocking made safer. (Score:2)
Re:Overclocking made safer. (Score:1)
Sounds good to me (Score:1, Interesting)
P.S. First post.
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:1)
In Soviet Russia
Sorry, had to
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:3, Funny)
Chips making chips? Now that's just stupid ;) (Score:2)
Manufacturing is another ballgame, but it's not as if humans are manufacturing chips anyway.
In terms of self-improvement, it seems this would require some AI, especially to do anything innovative (i.e. more than a load balancing maneuver).
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:1)
Oh dear, we are so boned, i mean you've seen the documentory Terminator?
Erm anyway, there is some stuff where you describe the problem, and it works out what to build, although as with any abstraction, it ain't as efficent. (and it ain't quite that simple
Links,
http://www.verilog.com/ [verilog.com]
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=VHDL [google.co.uk]
http: [imdb.com]
Basis for PowerTune? (Score:2)
This seems much different from the current speed stepping technologies as it doesn't scale down to a fixed MHz rating. That is, it isn't always 2.0Ghz during intensive operations and 1.2Ghz for non-intensive operations.
Re:Basis for PowerTune? (Score:4, Informative)
Obiligatory 2001 Quote... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obiligatory 2001 Quote... (Score:5, Interesting)
But on a more serious note, while this sounds pretty cool, it still breaks down to this: If a portion of the chip is screwed up, eFuse will bypass it. If you bypass part of the chip, you will have lower performance. I can see where this would be good in enterprise computing *IF* the chip also *TELLS* you that it is messed up, so if a portion of the chip becomes defective, it will still operate until it can be replaced. This would be great for uptimes and in mission critical systems, but for overclocking desktop system, this seems pretty useless, here is why:
Take a 2ghz chip. Overclock to 2.5ghz. Blow two eFuses (oops). Now chip at 2.5ghz functions as fast as a 2ghz chip. Clock back down, and it performs as fast as a 1.5ghz chip. Sell chip or system on eBay to someone without telling them eFuses are blown, screwing them over.
Unless there is a way to test if the eFuses are blown, I can see some real problems on the used market for this kind of chip. This would also apply to "why is this server performing like crap?" situations. Of course, as long as the eFuses are not blown, but are instead just reordering its own logic for specific uses (web server only, database server, etc), this would be majorly kick ass offering a quazi-specific purpose system on the fly. Especially once you have a kernel module that can talk to it and tell it what kinds of changes in routing would be best for a given platform, telling it "this computer is used for $x only, route logic accordingly".
Re:Obiligatory 2001 Quote... (Score:1)
I think that's the real advantage of these kinds of things. Now you won't have just an all-purpose processor, but an all purpose processor that can specalize in the task that you are currently working on.
Wouldn't this make it seem like you have a PC designed just for what you are doing, with everything you do?
Re:Obiligatory 2001 Quote... (Score:2)
It would seem to me that this is exactly what the article seems to indicate. If what you are doing is not i/o, disk or memory intensive, but instead 98% cpu cycles (like seti@home or other distributed computing) then it would adjust. If you are rendering frames in a SGI fashion, it would change. If you are using it for streaming media box, adjust. The big questions are: How long d
Re:Obiligatory 2001 Quote... (Score:1)
Oh you had to go there! (Score:2)
This is too tasty for the marketers... It is inevitable... After this is widespread, you will only be able to purchase base model chips. You want performance, purchase these 3 performance packs (which activate circuitry on your existing
Awesome (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Awesome (Score:1)
I have to change my name! (Score:1)
I'm running to the Court House RIGHT NOW!
Changing my name to John Conner!
Re:I have to change my name! (Score:2)
there is no future but what we make
wish it were more descriptive (Score:3, Insightful)
nothing is mentioned abt the redundancy required for the reroutings... its obvious not all kinds of faults can be handled this way. so, do they try to predict possible faults and build in workarounds.. or do they just use the natural design to handle whatever can be ?
wish the article had more info...
Precisely. Not self-healing. (Score:1, Insightful)
Self-healing would be something completely different, imho -- the ability to rebuild damaged circuitry from some kind of schematic or remaining information, or maybe the ability to fall back to general instructions on the main CPU if a specialist unit like a GPU failed.
Artificial Intelligence/Life (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Artificial Intelligence/Life (Score:1)
Re:Artificial Intelligence/Life (Score:1)
With a limit? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's capable of re-routing certain path when something went wrong, it'll eventually run out of alternative path, or the performance will be degraded to next to useless.
However it's certainly a good pre-emptive tool for mission critical machines, provided it has a way of informing the admin that it's dying, rather than secretly degrading.
Is it new or what? (Score:2)
On-Chip Sparing (Score:3, Insightful)
Default Color Link (Score:4, Informative)
Before that other guy does it:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/30/22025Re:Default Color Link (Score:2)
Re:Default Color Link (Score:3, Informative)
So with that in mind, because what else is there to do on a Saturday morning...I made a javascript bookmark that will replace whatever URL you're viewing in Slashdot with the default color scheme.
http://www.electricstate.com/slashdot.php [electricstate.com]
Obviously, it won't work when you're browsing the top-level category pages of a particular section, but once you're in
Re:Default Color Link (Score:2)
Article lacking detail... but... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it is very interesting that they are using something that was considered to be bad in chip reality (electromigration), as a positive thing.
This is, in analogy, like how our bodies exist symboticly with many different germs and such, for without we'd die alot sooner.
I don't think what the article is talking about is anything like reprogrammable chips (FPGAs) as some may think by reading the article, but rather something automatically used once between the chip production line and its actual ongoing system use to auto test and correct any production anomolies per chip. (is this where we say bye bye Neo?)
if it aint broke... (Score:2)
Maybe in a much larger scale, perhaps a motherboard that has reprogrammable chips, so that when your modem burns out from a power surge, it can reprogram some other mod
Re:if it aint broke... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:if it aint broke... (Score:2)
But let's imagine you have a cluster with 1024 diskless nodes. At that scale, you need a ridiculously high per-node mtbf just to get anything done before your cluster breaks down. This might be a lot simpler and cheaper than trying to manage redundancy at higher levels.
Or maybe you're building a chip to control antilock braking, or for that matter an airliner or a space ship. Even if the odds of braking something handled by this mechanism are fairly low, it might st
eBONDAGE, eDRM, eVIBRATORS (Score:2, Interesting)
i know on-chip fuses (PROM?) have been around before and this seems to basically just be the same thing but more reliable and with 'e' on the end which im guessing stands for electromigration, which AFAIK is a problem with very small paths on chips that get screwed up by the flow of electrons and some sort of ionic-bondage-thingy interactio
Re:eBONDAGE, eDRM, eVIBRATORS (Score:1)
Re:eBONDAGE, eDRM, eVIBRATORS (Score:1)
Customizing chips in the future (Score:1)
Re:Customizing chips in the future (Score:1)
Anyway, thinking about talented IBM people, may be they ha
Potentially disastrous for desktop CPU's (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about the latest worm going around taking your nice new 3200Mhz processor to an effective 100mhz by blowing all the fuses and crippling it.
I would guess though, because of the high R&D costs involved, this will only ever see its way into high-end servers.
Re:Potentially disastrous for desktop CPU's (Score:1)
I'm guessing that won't happen. Chances are this feature was designed to work around problems in a high end server. Trying to keep a mainframe at 99.999% uptime requires the ability to adapt to hardware failure. Thus, this would be a part of the hardware, and the software would only know about it enough to send the message to your IBM support person to come f
Re:Potentially disastrous for desktop CPU's (Score:2)
You have a poor grasp on basic economics. If something costed a lot in R&D, that is a good reason to mass produce it to spread the R&D costs over a lot of units. The only reason why something is limited to high-end products is that the MANUFACTURING costs are high and the article explicitely states that the fuses are added at no additional cost. So the only logical thing for IBM
Re:"Basic Economics" - good one! (Score:1)
Why do you think companies purposely disable features with a ZERO manufacturing cost? Its called product differentiation, look it up in your ecos textbook, sunshine. They MAY decide to license it for mass market, then again it may be more profitable as a drawcard for the highend segment.
Re:"Basic Economics" - good one! (Score:2)
Argh! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Argh! (Score:1)
>> I would imagine everyone reading your post ...
You know, just before I scrolled down to parent's parent, I thought to myself, "Aaah, my eyes!" then "Nah, I won't post that because everyone here is posting through this hellish beige haze. Don't bother"
All within 2 seconds, I scrolled down to parent's parent. While you're technically right, I now understand the na
Re:Argh! (Score:2)
A friend of mine pointed out that if you change the "it." in the URL to say... "games." it works fine, and is readable.
Nothing new to see folks (Score:3, Informative)
Look through the website. IBM is even a customer.
Who benefits really? (Score:5, Interesting)
This technology is more beneficial for IBM than for us because it will allow IBM to SELL defective-but-self-repairable chips instead of SCRAPPING them. Because of this, it is highly probable that there will be no way end users will be able to garner info about to what extent the chip has already repaired itself.
If this is the case IBM will probably take one of the following roads:
1) Continue with the current manufacturing standards - this would yield chips with more longevity.
2) Manufacture chips with less stringent (and hence cheaper) manufacturing standards - although this would yield more defective chips, these won't be thrown away since they can self repair; they will be sold instead!
I really hope it's not option #2 they chose.
Re:Who benefits really? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who benefits really? (Score:1)
Without this ability, the chips would be extremely more expensive, and probably not even via
Re:Who benefits really? (Score:2)
Instead of making lots of different ranges of chips, make one chip type for each architecture. With normal manufacture there are a lot of failed chips. But with this you can sell most of those chips at a lower price. You could then have a much improved success rate, the reduced function chips sold at a discount instead of tossed away.
Depending on the numbers, this could reduce the overall price of chips.
Next up (Score:1)
Overclocking makes the chip kill you!
Download an MP3, Blow Up your CPU? (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM better be REAL carefull with this too. If it's possible to fool the chip into blowing these fuses, a virus could potentially damage millions of computers in a day of spreading.
As others mentioned, it is a neat trick, but a solution in search of a problem. CPU's just don't fail all that often to need something like this.
Re:Download an MP3, Blow Up your CPU? (Score:3, Interesting)
We're probably going to be hearing a lot more of those stories in the future as a result of this development. Except that the IBM guy won't have to actually come over and clip anything. They'll be able to do it across the Net by asking you to download an Install program, which
Re:Download an MP3, Blow Up your CPU? (Score:2)
We already live in that world. Viruses can already in theory toast BIOSes by flashing them with crap, or (equivalently for most people) destroying the OS. This new tech really wouldn't change anything (and BIOS destruction is likely to be "lower hanging fruit" for a while yet).
Wait for the exploits (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wait for the exploits (Score:1)
Re:Wait for the exploits (Score:2)
Cool, then we can all install an Acorn BBC B ROM and happily be playing Chuckie Egg or Repton all evening!
Memory - not logic (Score:2, Insightful)
From the article, it appears this innovation applies to the embedded memory on a logic chip:
"...all 90 nanometer custom chips, including those designed with IBM's advanced embedded DRAM technology"
Roll Back ?? (Score:1)
When did Skynet come online again? (Score:2)
Great. Now Hackers can screw my CPU (Score:1)
Some stupid worm uses a backdoor to start a haywire self-healing sequence?
Dave... Dave... Nah. More like... FZzzzzttt...
Douglas N. Adams (Score:1)
Re:Douglas N. Adams (Score:1)
Radiation hardness? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Radiation hardness? (Score:2)
Why do people have to think radioactive?
While satellites may exist in a highly ionizing environment, I think it is inappropiate to call it radioactive.
It would also be useful for interplanetry probes - I would wager that a lot of mass can be removed if the hardware was more resilient.
(Although, the support callout would be prohibitly expensive)
Didn't the old Pioneer/Voyager probes have processors built with transistors in such a way that they can degrade gracefully? I seem to recall reading that the engi
I'm missing something here (Score:2)
FPGAs? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it shouldn't be that mutch of an issues to program some part of the FPGA with the logic to reprogram the rest?
And start from there. Damn, this sounds so uber-call. Retargatable and reprogrammable logic really blends the line between software and hardware.
Re:FPGAs? (Score:2)
We do it already. The latest Xilinx FPGAs have an internal reconfiguration port, so the FPGA logic can reprogram itself.
We published a paper earlier this year about running Linux on an FPGA processor, with this reconfiguration port mapped into /dev. Basically we can partially reconfigure the FPGA under OS control while the rest of the FPGA (incl. the CPU with linux) keeps going. See m
Re:FPGAs? (Score:1)
Re:FPGAs? (Score:2)
Absolutely. Oh the fun you can have when you can modify the hardware as easily as you can the OS...
Just thinking of using Windows to do this give me chest pains.
Indeed. Also since this is publically funded research, I feel there is an ethical responsibility to ensure that the outcomes benefit the community in general (a la open source), rather than a s
Upgrade about processors? (Score:1)
Wonder Processor Powers: ACTIVATE! (Score:2)
Shape of: A Laser Fuse!
Form of: A Morphing Microchip, uh, made out of ICE!
Self-healing cool, color scheme sucks (Score:1, Troll)
Maybe we can direct IBM's research toward self-healing color schemes.
Dynamic Processor Sparing (Score:1)
When does this happen in the movie? (Score:3, Funny)
Dark Helmet: "What happened to then?"
Col. Sanders: "We passed it."
Dark Helmet: "When?"
Col. Sanders: "Just now. We're at now, now."
Dark Helmet: "Go back to then."
Col. Sanders: "When?"
Dark Helmet: "Now."
Col. Sanders: "Now?"
Dark Helmet: "Now!"
Col. Sanders: "I can't."
Dark Helmet: "Why?"
Col. Sanders: "We missed it."
Dark Helmet: "When?"
Col. Sanders: "Just now."
Dark Helmet: "When will then be now?"
Col. Sanders: "Soon."
No, it's not! (Score:2)
No, it's not! It won't be here for another three... oh, never mind. Now it is here.
steve
But will they call these? (Score:1)
Now viruses that physically alter hardware (Score:2)