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48 Core Vega 2 in the Making
TobyKY76 writes to tell us The Inquirer is reporting that upstart Azul Systems is planning to integrate 48 cores on their next generation chip. From the article: "The first-generation Vega processor it designed has 24 cores but the firm expects to double that level of integration in systems generally available next year with the Vega 2, built on TSMC's 90nm process and squeezing in 812 million transistors. The progress means that Azul's Compute Appliances will offer up to 768-way symmetric multiprocessing."
Oh my God, 768 way processor!!! I almost had a fit when I saw suns http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2006-03/sunf lash.20060321.3.xml'>t1 processor I need to sit and catch my breath, this is a multithreader's wet dream. Hmmm I wonder how oracle will price running on this processor?
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
Now I can finally deal with the 768 or so pop ups that come up whenever I attempt to use my computer!!
Chums up, let's do this!
Behold the power of copy/paste!
Yeah, yeah... my Karma is SUPER negative...
I know of a certain project that's working to put over a million cores into a system (160 into a single chip), and it should be finished and available off-the-shelf within a year or so.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Enough CPU power that even Microsoft Office will run with a little pep!
I read the article, and I was a little confused on that point. I would think that they are definately not.
But I'd tend to take a website's articles with a grain of salt when the links at the bottom of the page are:
"Home Discuss on our Forum Flame Author
Recommend this article Print"
Sounds to me like someone issued a press release and wants a share of the excess VC floating around... and the Inquirer took the bait. They did a good job of not loading the buzzwords, though -- they didn't say they would 'leverage their experience with graphics chip design' or anything like that.
I'd expect this company to turn around and sell out to AMD or Intel at the earliest opportunity, if given the chance.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Will there finally be a PC which can actually meet Windows Vista system requirements? Sign me up!
(posting as AC because n00bs with mod points lack any sense of humor)
768 cores. Finally, a box that will run Everquest II.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
"...upstart Azul Systems."
The editors are so useless they can't even copy and paste... TFA calls them "startup Azul Systems"
... video cards.
Given the super pace that ATI and nVidia are going at, how long before they adopt this tech for their video cards. Heck, their top end cards have more ram, suck more juice, and cost more than most pc's anyway. I can just see some ATI guys drooling over the opportunity to deliver a 512 core (x2 with SLI) video card with 2GB RAM. Of course it'll need it's own separate power supply and cooling tower, but that's another issue and the game freaks will buy it anyway so they can run their favourite game at 1.5x frame rate AA.
A minute earlier - and you could've been first to make that tired joke - but YOU FAIL IT!
by BigZaphod (12942) Wednesday March 29, @06:42AM (#15013114)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
by pxuongl (758399) Wednesday March 29, @06:43AM (#15013117)
imagine a beowulf cluster of these guys...
Dual cores, quad cores, whatever, I can understand that for multitasking and programming. But 768 cores? What would possibly use that many cores? And for any single task, the thing would not be efficient. What exactly is the point of this? Bragging rights?
Way to go Vega! Watch those cylinder sleeves if you got 'em!
Would'nt wanna see how htop looked on that possible SMP setup... I would have to page down atleast 80-100 pages of per-processor load meters before i got to the processes list :S
htop(top on stereoids): http://htop.sf.net
So, chip manufacturer's have adopted the Gillette approach to marketing chips. I guess it was inevitable after they went from one core to two. The only difference, I expect, is that they'll increase by powers of 2. Soon, we'll have a Intel Mach 512 Core Sensor Extreme or something :P
"Each 64-bit Cyclops64 chip (processor) will run at 500 megahertz and contain 80 cores." While it may have two threads per core, that is not what you claimed. You stated "...that's working to put over a million cores into a system (160 into a single chip)". 160 threads per chip, yes, but not 160 cores.
It would seem to me, that a CPU's workload is roughly limited by the number of transistors it has multiplied by it's MHz speed. No matter how many cores one has, the transistor count should remain roughly the same for a 1-core, 2-core, 8-core chip of the same nm process and is limited by that process (90 nm in this case).
I would suppose (but am not sure) extra cores reduce the number of transistors being idle at any one moment. The downside would seem that each extra core reduces the capability to process highly sequential problems in favor of highly paralell problems.
I know extra cores are nice to an extent, but isn't there a point where the paralellized gains aren't worth reduction in individual core capability? So these chips may be great for networks (routers, etcetera) but not so nice in desktops.
Are have I missed something completely?
Now except for the MHZ/GHZ wars the new standard will be how many cores your processor has. By 2026 My PC has 2k cores while your PC has only 1.5k cores, Thus my PC is superior, It will be just a pointless as comparing PCs using MHZ/GHZ
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
A bazillion application specific cores isn't a new idea. Cisco's Silicon Packet Processor has 188 cores per chip to help the CRS-1 get to 92 Tbps.
The chip to really watch out for will be the M. Bison
Yeah, but does it run Linux?
How well do these multi-core chips fail? Do they fail silently? Do they come crashing down if even a single core on them fails?
Are we putting too many eggs in one basket? I thought modular design was good.
Oh well, back to setting up Linux on old dell boxes. Maybe I will get a real server one day. *grin*
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
If Intel's two cores are 'Extreme Edition' what should these be called? Ludicrous Edition? With a little sign by them saying 'Never Use'?
Trying to be humorous, not seriously comparing the two chips.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
Finally, a hardware platform that will support Windows Vista.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
So what does the memory interconnect look like on this thing? They say its not NUMA but I see no mention of what it is.
There's no way you can feed that many processors over a single bus and if you've got symmetric access to a bunch of busses, that's one heck of a cross bar switch and I don't see that its any easier to program than NUMA. Instead of making sure data you need fast is local you have to make sure you load balance - that has to be harder much of the time.
Squirrel!
Insert obligatory, 'One core should be enough for anybody,' comment by ignorant Slashdotter.
...next you'll be reporting that the processor will be produced by aliens who decended from clouds in the shape of Satan. The processor burned the world's fattest baby and melted his arm in half.
No matter how hot a girl is - some guy somewhere is sick of her shit.
reports show that Java still runs dog slow, even with the 768-way configuration."
Ah, the more things change, the more they stay the same!
fak3r.com
I'm not as impressed by the sillicon as I am by their product... it's a platform-agnostic application accellerator, designed to make Java apps (or any other VM app) optimized for multithreading go like stink. It does for processing power what a storage server does for disk space. Plug it into the network, and go... all it does is run a gajillion threads for the VM living on your general purpose servers. Each core probably isn't very powerful (altho they are 64bit RISC designs), but if you're in dire need of cramming as many lightweight transactions through as possible, lots and lots of little optimized processors are going to be more help than one or two big, fat general-purpose Opterons.
It's a very neat concept, and the careful wording ("virtual machine accellerator") indicates that they aren't tied to just Java... Azul's Compute Pool could be something future Parrot-lovers can use to sneak LAMP into places where Java rules all.
They're using some serious sillicon know-how to fuel an innovative and original product... gives me hope we aren't doomed to a wintel-only world, after all.
get 'em while they are hot!!!!
Does anyone know how you keep all the cores busy ? What kind of ulta-high-bandwidth memory architecture do they use (not clear from architecture) ? What kind of cores are these ? In-order, simple 6-10 state pipleline or more complex ones ? And more importantly, what is the power consumption ?
So which is better? Vega, or IBM/Toshiba Cell Processor?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I've noticed a few people getting the numbers wrong already... 1. It is NOT 768 cores, it is 48 cores with 768 paths through them. 2. They never mention the die size so this processor could be significantly larger in terms of silicon than others. 3. Its score in 3DMark is INSANE, not Ludicrous.
But 768 cores? What would possibly use that many cores?
"No one would ever need more than 640K"
"We can just use two digits and assume it's always 1990 something"
sigh...
768 Threads = 768 Memory Accesses.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yeah, but will it run Linux?
...what's the framerate for Quake when you run this baby?
because a CPU failure usually leads to you peeing the bed...
Especially if you are the sys/admin who did not order a spare X core chip or worse budget for the inevitable cost of ever replacing one or more of these behemoths!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
There are fundamental limits to speed, but not to multiple cores (well, quarks in the universe maybe). The speed race was due to laziness in writing multithreaded applications.
Why must I think of Tom's Diner every time I see Vega?? Damn you Suzanne !!
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Ah, never mind.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
I hate this idea. Clustering - okay. But SMP? No way. The more CPUs - the more points-of-failure - and for SMP - that bring everything down.
Can you imagine the MTBF on a puppy like this?!
Now if were talking about two-by-n redundancy - (or something of the equiv.) - that's a whole other story - but now were not just talking CPUs - caches too.
But since that technology itself is more complicated than just copy-and-pasting a bunch of cores - I don't think that's the kind of think that can be "slapped-in" at the last minute - nevermind the software implications...
The articles continues:
"with the added processing power of the Vega, Doom 3 is expected to run in excess if 20 FPS."
If I say "Finally, Microsoft will run quickly" I score a 5, but if I say "Finally, Java will run quickly" I am a troll? I need to know because since I seem to be stuck in some sort of bad Karma spiral and need to get out.
Duke Nukem Forever?
(ducking... but c'mon... it had to be said)
actually only a millisecond difference would've been enough to give the 6:42, 6:43 difference. bastard beat me to the punch
My first thoughts were graphics applications, particularly 3d and rendering apps. This could be especially useful when it comes to things like raytracing for an animation, where you could dedicate parts of the work to different cores. Kinda like having a server farm all in one machine...
Right now, it seems like they're a company, but they don't have a product yet. I guess that means...
There is no Vega only Azul.
(Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
DNA work, or other easily parallized processes.. For high end work.. Its not so you can run word or something.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What I would wonder about is how this would work for heat. From a software perspective dual-core chips appear as multiple processors, as it seems to essentially be having multiple processing units in a single die (correct me if I'm a bit off here, searching for the simplest answer).
The issue I see with this is:
Multiple processors generate more heat, and consume more power. Would it not be the same for multiple cores, thus making such a machine a power-chugging space-heater? Are special cooling devices required when you start hitting so many cores?
Keep 1280 cores at a 90-100% load, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They show no sign of stopping.
It is called supercomputing.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Is it just me or has /. really been behind the pace of news lately? I'm seeing links come up like hours or even days after I see 'em on theinquirer, arstechnica, macnn, etc...
I wonder how oracle will price running on this processor?
Obviously, the answer is 42!
Have any onf you people visted Azul's website? This is not an Intel compatible machine.
It is going to only run a Java Virtual Machine so anything written in Java will run on it.
Windows will not run on it. I took some operating system courses in college and the intel
architecture is a huge mess of hideousness of backwards compatibility that luckily only operating system implementers have to deal with. By only running Java these guys get to sidestep the whole mess and focus
on massively optimizing the hardware architecture for running java code.
http://www.azulsystems.com/products/nap.html
x = zeta(y)
w = gamma(z)
print(x+w)
The code explicitly states that x should be calculated before w although they could certainly be calculated concurrently. Of course a smart compiler could figure out the dependencies, but the programming language shouldn't force the programmer to specify an order when none exist.
I predict that non-procedural languages will dominate the future of programming. Some currently used languages seem already well-suited for taking advantage of multiple cores, like HDL languages, functional languages, Labview-style languages.
The grandparents is completely right, the amount of work a proc can do is, in absolute, the number of transistor it has times the number of times per second you can get them to do something.
In a way that's true, but most cpu's are nowhere near the bound of what you can get from the transistor count. The general purpose nature of them makes that true.
If you've ever used a hardware definition language like verilog, it becomes apparent that you can design silicon that can do FAR more per clock cycle than most CPUs. As a novice I was able to get a 100Mhz FPGA doing computations faster than I would have been able to get from an 800Mhz P3.
Now the challenge of course is getting a general purpose CPU to have that sort of efficiency which is not trivial. Azul seem to have the right general idea, they'll make a chip optimized to particular tasks and try to get a little closer to the ideal.
Now, we have this multi-core, multi-threaded Java processor. It might be faster than a single/dual-core AMD processor.
However, I would bet good money (on AMD stock) that Azul processor is, in fact, slower than an AMD processor with the same number of cores and threads. The whole purpose of Azul is to sucker some venture capitalists into paying fat salaries to the managers and slaves working at Azul.
Also, the lawsuit by Azul against Sun is a mere publicity stunt. The supposed patents for the supposed technology in the Java processors of yesteryear are not worth the paper on which the patents are written. Don't believe me. Fire up Live Search (by America's modern-day Bell Labs) and try to find any of yesteryear's Java processor still being sold.
For comparison purposes, the Cell processor in the PS3 has something like 100 million transistors, comes from a 90 nm process, and has a die size of about 1 cm square. The Cell has a modestly-sized cache, which means that its transistors are mostly given over to functional blocks. This is in contrast to something like a P4 Extreme edition, which has a higher transistor density because more than half its die is cache memory.
TFA does not mention anything about this new processor's die size. But, if we scale up the Cell processor's transistor density, the Vega processor, with 812 million transistors, would result in a die size of about 800 mm^2, which is more than one square inch. In the processor industry, that kind of die size is just plain ridiculous. I wonder what the yields are?
developers are already having a hard time coping with Cell's 7 or 8 cores for the PS3. IBM had to release a proprietary compiler (octopiler) to calm down the coding cries. Wouldn't 48 cores be a developer's nightmare?
These systems are Java appliances designed to run JVMs. It basically, attaches to your regular intel/amd/whatever box and looks like just another mount point. It has software that proxies any java server calls to the azul appliance and runs your jvm. Its basically throwing hardware at the 4 way 4GB problem that JVMs typically have.
What kind of company is stupid enough to name its product after the worst car ever produced by Chevy? Man will it be funny if they walk into Baby Boom Corporate America trying to pitch hardware with the "48 core high-tech Vega engine inside", complete with a Hindi accent and a 1970s wardrobe.
Your just jeolous that Duke nukem forever, that I got on a 300GB 3D optical disk, runs at 300fps on this machine.
"The desktop is the computer."
His name is Robert Paulsen...
I'm currently evaluating the feasibility of using Blender included in a Linux distribution named Tomahawk Desktop.
Using Blender has a significant cost advantage. Our bottleneck is the rendering time. We expect these chips may be available soon at a price SOHO can afford.
Many others have posted their proposed uses for massively parallel processing units. Personally I see this as a great server platform for running software that is already optimized for multiprocessor architectures. But you also bring up a good point in that most software is not optimized for multithread CPUs, especially on the desktop.
A few years ago only expensive servers had multiple processors. Now every major CPU maker produces a multicore chip as their flagship product. Many of these chips have hit consumer level prices. I think it is only a matter of time before we start seeing a proliferation of multithreaded software.
How can pointing out there's a current Sun Lawsuit with these guys be a troll? TFA even mentions the Sun lawyers:
"The scalability is showing is attracting big-name early adopters, including Credit Suisse - and even enough to have Sun Microsystems lawyers hammering at the door, alleging intellectual property infringements."
Basically Sun are saying that Azul are infringing on Sun's patents and have illegaly obtained Suns trade secrets. Sun have tried to take part ownership of the Azul and charge ongoing license fee's. Azul have given Sun a chance to look at their documents etc to prove that they haven't infringed on the patents, but Sun haven't taken them up on the offer - I believe Azul are trying to sue Sun also as they believe they're just trying to distract their companies resources.
Personally I wouldn't like to pin my hopes on a chip that has so much politics going on behind the scenes - I'd rather wait until all of this is sorted.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
Who needs 768 processors? 640 ought to be enough for anybody!
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
If the O/S allocates a core to an icon, that would work.