During a keynote address at the 42nd Design Automation Conference here Tuesday (June 14), Meyerson said, "Holistic design is a new paradigm in value creation."

Meyerson reiterated a point he's made in the past: that classic CMOS scaling is dead. "Why did scaling break down? Atoms don't scale," Meyerson said. "With modern oxides you're at 10 to 12 angstroms, five atoms thick. If you're going to scale that to 2.5 atoms, you're getting into nuclear fission and I'm just out of there."

However, innovations such as strained silicon, which improve electron mobility, and getting off the gigahertz race horse and adopting multicore approaches to microprocessor design can continue to move technology ahead, Meyerson noted.

"Making things smaller is not an invention. Playing around with a basic band structure is an invention."

According to Meyerson, this manner of thinking enabled IBM to deploy the Power architecture as a two-core chip, with each core running a reasonably leisurely 800 MHz each in the BlueGene/L supercomputer, the world's fastest. The system turned out to achieve a one hundred-fold reduction in size (320 square feet v. 32,500 square feet) of the previous fastest supercomputer, NECs Earth Simulator, while running at 1/28th the power (216 kW vs. 6000 kW).

Meyerson also said the industry does well when it adopts corporate "coopetition" alliances to develop technology before taking it to market, such as IBM has done with the Cell processor design with Toshiba and Sony.