A Single-Chip Multiprocessor for Smart Terminals

What will information terminals look like in the 21st century? We believe they will require three important features: mobility, intelligence, and diversity. With the Internet, a large number of our daily activities will take place on information terminals. Mobility increases their convenience; for instance, wherever we are, we bring global currency with electronic commerce, and whenever we want to go, we are in public or business offices with electronic government and virtual offices. Intelligence should be another key issue in the new millennium. Predictions indicate that many artificial objects will acquire intelligence such as “automobiles that understand human speech, artificial bugs that fly, robots with human-like emotion, ...”. Our information terminal will be a sensible partner as well as a smart interface to the digital world. The terminal will understand what we say, help us communicate with people speaking any language, and at the end of the 21st century might talk with creatures. Since everyone will have her/his own terminal for different times, places, and occasions, an enormous variety of terminals will be produced. This will result in a diversity of terminals and public servers should answer all requests from these terminals. To attain these features, low-power and high-performance microprocessors are indispensable. Obviously, lower power enhances mobility by enabling longer battery lives. High performance is necessary for intelligence and diversity. The artificial intelligence needed for information terminals includes recognition and understanding at first, and imagination and creation later in the middle of the century. For “true” intelligence, we require much higher computer performance, especially for dictionary handling and searching. For example, about 30% of CPU time is spent in a speech recognition system, as we will show later. At this ratio we greatly increase our ability to analyze the experiences of the speaker. The diversity of terminals demands standardization of information descriptions because huge varieties of terminals will access the information. Although XML and Java are currently becoming artificial-language standards, language abstraction continues unabated. Interpretation of such high-level abstract languages requires high performance. The MP98 low-power, high-performance microprocessor architecture supports smart information terminals using the technologies of single-chip multiprocessor and low-voltage circuits. Its first prototype (code named Merlot) achieves 1 giga instructions/sec (GIPS) at 1 watt. In this article, we briefly describe the MP98 architecture from a viewpoint of software. Then, we realize several basic algorithms in artificial intelligence on our multithreaded Masato Edahiro Satoshi Matsushita Masakazu Yamashina Naoki Nishi