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."

Comments

Re:Oh wow!!

[liliafan]

lol lol, hmmm $40,000 per processor / 2 for virtual processors $20,000 * 768 = $15,360,000 licence fee per chip, no wonder Larry isn't worried about the sales of oracle stagnating, as soon as people upgrade from their old duel core to these he beats billy boy in the billionaires list :op

A new beginning

[jellomizer]

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

Size

[necro81]

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?