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Quad Core Chips From Intel and AMD
lubricated writes "According to the San Fransisco Chronicle, in an effort to one-up AMD, Intel will be coming out with 4 core cpu's in 2007." From the article: "Chips with two cores have been the latest rage, with both Intel and AMD selling those microprocessors as their high-end offering. Apple Computer Inc.'s new iMac, which started selling last month, uses the dual-core chip ... Not to be outdone, Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president of server and workstation division, said Friday that his firm is working its own quad-core processor for release next year."
Not to be outdone by AMD..? Bad news: AMD made this very same announcement in June/2005, indicating quad-core CPUs would be available 'sometime in 2007'.
Sun has been shipping 8 core T1 processors for a few months. T1000 and T2000 rack servers based on "CoolThreads" - whatever that is. See here: http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process= SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=141649. IBM has QuadCore Power5+ chips shipping any day now.
Both Solaris and AIX scale over 100 CPUs already. Good luck AMD and Intel on getting Microsoft to create a standard OS (not their funny datacenter version) that is the same on 1 CPU or 124 CPU systems.
Processing power is rarely the problem. Graphics processing is already handed off, and unless you're trying to crack encryption, most software isn't bound by processor speed anyway.
Software performance is bound by I/O limitations. It FEELS like processor power because threads on hold for I/O block a core up like cheescake to a lactose intollerant grandparent.
Until I can index on disk at about 100 times the current speed, these processors won't help what I'm doing.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Intel said they were going to be releasing x100-core processors by 2015.
Just watch the Intel 2005 Keynote speech, (video) hear about x100 cores and x100 GBits/sec chip-chip data transfer.
It's not like this is a big secret or anything.
As usual, if you want good CPU info, Ars Technica is the place to look. They have a blurb on Intel's 4-way core plans here.
Basically, they point out that Intel's dual core processors are already starved on the FSB, and loading two more cores isn't going to do very much. He seems to expect that, until Intel gets their FSB in order(which won't happen until 2008), AMD is going to stomp all over them. He says that Intel's cores are excellent, but without CSI (their new FSB), it may not matter much.
My own projection is that the extra contention may end up imposing a net speed _penalty_ for many workloads. That is, however, pure speculation from an amateur, based mostly on the dismal performance of the first dual-CPU G4 Macs.
Just before the end of the Alpha line, DEC prototyped an 8-core Alpha. It's not clear that it was useful, but they did succeed in cramming eight CPUs on one die over five years ago.
As long as we're waving "number of cores" about as if it were the number of inches a piece of spam is promising:
g le+chip/2100-1006_3-5399128.html
http://news.com.com/Designer+puts+96+cores+on+sin
In short, Clearspeed's CSX600 has 96 cores, but is designed to be an accelerator board.
Well, you can, for some things. The problem is that the speed of even gigabit Ethernet is so slow (compared to the speed of the interconnect between two CPUs on the same chip or motherboard) that in order for a program that runs well over a cluster, it often has to be designed completely differently from a program that will run well on a multi-CPU machine. In particular, things like shared memory are extremely difficult to simulate over a network, but trivial when you've got a single machine where the CPUs, well, share the memory.
For a lot of problem types, the high latency and low bandwidth of the network interconnect lead to the situation where you've spent hours and hours getting your app to run across all the CPUs in your cluster, only to find out that it's actually running slower than the simple version of the app that does everything on a single CPU. That's really embarrassing...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.