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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."
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.
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Enough CPU power that even Microsoft Office will run with a little pep!
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
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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.
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If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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?
They are not x86 compatible. They are RISC like chips with an instruction set optimized for for running VM based applications like Java and .NET.
That said, its still very impressive to get that many cores working together, though not as impressive as x86.
LL
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.
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
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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.
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.
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Finally, a hardware platform that will support Windows Vista.
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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!
The number of transistors can go up for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is designs that utilize complex performance enhancements. To name a few:
The secondary source of transistor usage is coprocessors like Floating Point Units and SIMD Units.
The latest craze in processor design is to simplify the microprocessor back down to the most basic level. From there, the processors are ramped up through shear numbers of parallel pipelines (i.e. threads) and cores as opposed to ramping up the individual CPU horsepower. These multi-core chips typically share coprocessors among a pipelines or cores, and may even have entire cores dedictated to specific tasks like SIMD. As a result, a properly designed program will be able to execute within a very short period of time, thanks to the parallel nature of the multi-core architecture.
Now the only problem is in finding these "properly written programs".
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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.
You meant that in jest... but this is the kind of parallelization required to run such things as Ray-traced applications or games in realtime (or at least jerky realtime - which is much better than several seconds watching each frame draw).
/
/ screenshots/mutlipleReflectiveSpheres.JPG
Refer to:
http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~sidapohl/egoshooter
and for a screenshot with multiple reflection:
http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~sidapohl/egoshooter
Funny I think leaking head gaskets and rust when ever I see Vega. I must be getting old.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"duel core"? Are they fighting or something? They will not share the work very well if they are fighting. Maybe you should give them a time-out or something.
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.)
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The box is a flat SMP - if a core misses in L2 it's the same cost to any piece of memory (or remote L2).
The cores are our own design, not MIPs, not ARM, etc. Simple, short in-order pipeline, decent caches (not huge) caches.
Power consumption is very low compared to the equivalent stack of P4 blades or other main-frame solution.
The first-gen box (368 cores) is about 2700 watts in an 11U rack mount.
Next-gen box isn't much bigger, nor draws very much more power (a little more of both I belive).
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.
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?
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.
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