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Four Core Processor to Bring Tera Ops

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the whole-lotta-ops dept.

panhandler writes "As reported at CNet and the Austin American Statesman, researchers at UT are working with IBM on a new CPU architecture called TRIPS (Tera-op Reliable Intelligently adaptive Processing System). According to IBM, 'at the heart of the TRIPS architecture is a new concept called 'block-oriented execution"' which will result in a processor capable of executing more than 1 trillion operations per second."

10 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Better link by Textbook+Error · · Score: 5, Informative

    A somewhat more informative link for more info. Would it really kill submitters to put a link to the actual project in their submission...

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    Nae bother
  2. See The Project Yourself by robbyjo · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here

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  3. Only 32 Billion Now by Nazmun · · Score: 4, Informative

    The four cores add up to only 32 billion operations right now according to the CNet article. They project that they won't reach 1 trillion until 2010.

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    Hmmm... Pie...
  4. Re:Great.... by n3rd · · Score: 3, Informative

    Great... Just what we need, processors that can perform an instruction, then wait 40000 cycles for the next instruction to be read from memory. I wish we could see some memory improvements to go along with these.

    Sun is working on something along those lines, check it out

  5. Memory by Detritus · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's easy to throw 8 processors on a motherboard. The hard part is designing a memory subsystem that can supply the bandwidth for 8 processors and any other bus masters. Plus, you have to provide cache coherency for all of those processors.

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    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
    1. Re:Memory by White+Rabbitt · · Score: 2, Informative
      Wasn't one of the main premises of the TRIPS system that each processor is more or less independent of its neighbors? They used the term "network" to describe the processors' interrelationship. With operating systems that commonly are processing 20 threads when no apps are running (*cough* XP), what would be the advantage of increased "networking" of the processors?

      It appears that the only issue that would be solved is there would be less lag between processors--but at the speeds they're talking about, the memory supply and caching will present new issues anyhow, ne?

      Sorry about my complete disregard for proper terminology...

  6. I just wanted to say... by boola-boola · · Score: 4, Informative

    ....that I've had Doug Burger and Steve Keckler as professors here at UT, and not only do they know their stuff, but they're great professors as well, and they really seem to intimately care about the technology. They have a great sense of humor too (such as Dr. Burger complaining that he doesn't even have root access to his own machines :-P)

  7. Re:And Windows 2005... by slittle · · Score: 2, Informative

    ??

    Things change plenty. Windows' boot times have been improving in recent years, esp. compared to the Win9x days.

    I think you meant to make a crack about Doom III or something...

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    Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
  8. Re:And Windows 2005... by julesh · · Score: 3, Informative

    Come on, funny as the line might be, timing from power-on to having a working desktop, my systems come in like this:

    Windows 2000 - 45 seconds
    Windows 98 - 1 minute
    Linux + KDE 2 - 1 minute 10 seconds

    (Admittedly linux + console is about 20 seconds, but that's not really a fair comparison - Windows 98 'text mode only', i.e. DOS, is only about 2 seconds).

    Also, boot up time is largely IO bound. Improving your processor speed will make comparatively little difference (I think doubling speed might shave 10% off these figures, possibly more for the Linux one because the KDE issue is dynamic linking related which is a CPU problem).

  9. Unfair comparison by axxackall · · Score: 3, Informative
    W2k keeps loading its services even AFTER I login. I can change the boot sequence order to Linux time for X11 Login prompt at least half.

    Well, I don;t need postfix, Apache, Zope, MySQL, PostgreSQL and many other services at the moment of login. So, Win2k designers has recognized the it and optimized the boot sequence being oriented for a desktop user. In Linux we still keep a server-oriented mentality, that's why XDM/GDM/KDM/EDM is always the last thing to start.

    Besides, Win2 boots some services in parallel, while in Linux we still boot all of them sequentially, waiting for [OK] string before starting the next one. The only way to paralelize the sequence is to track dependencies between services. In Gentoo there are some efforts to do the parallel boot.

    But as for now, Linux is (by dfault) is oriented for servers, and GUI login is the last (ltterally last) thing you need on your server.

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    Less is more !