Design of the IBM Blue Gene/Q compute chip

The heart of a Blue Gene®/Q system is the Blue Gene/Q Compute (BQC) chip, which combines processors, memory, and communication functions on a single chip. The Blue Gene/Q Compute chip has 16 + 1 + 1 processor cores, each with a quad single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) floating-point unit, and a multi-versioned Level 2 cache that provides hardware support for transactional memory, speculative execution, and atomic operations. The Blue Gene/Q Compute chip further contains dual on-chip memory controllers for directly attached DDR3 (double data rate type 3) memory and sophisticated networking logic for chip-to-chip communications.