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Intel Pledges 80 Core Processor in 5 Years
ZonkerWilliam writes "Intel has developed an 80 core processor with claims 'that can perform a trillion floating point operations per second.'" From the article: "CEO Paul Otellini held up a silicon wafer with the prototype chips before several thousand attendees at the Intel Developer Forum here on Tuesday. The chips are capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second, Otellini said during a keynote speech. The company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window."
Unfortunately, they'll all choke on a shared memory bus :-)
promised us 8-10Ghz Pentium4 CPUs when they started with the P4 "Willamette"? Or how they promised us 5GHz Prescotts?
I'll rather wait and see what I can actually buy in 5 years. No need to trust a vendor so far in the future what they can do.
Why oh why won't Intel spend their research dollars on something useful, like a bus architecture that can actually keep up with present performance levels?
Faster processors are great, but when will we see massive improvements in data storage...
Imagine the pain of having to write a functional applications with so many cores. I hope the interconnect will be very very fast. Otherwise writing massively scalable parallel algorithms will be masssively painful. And with so many cores, one will need multiple independants memory banks with some kind of NUMA. And writing apps for those things isn't fun. You have to spend so much time caring about the parallel stuff instead of caring about the problem.
I seriously hope that power consumption and heat disipation are really attacked before these things come out. Can you imagine needing a 200-amp service and liquid nitrogen cooling for something like that right now?
Just as Gates couldn't imagine what anyone would want with more memory than 640KB, we can't imagine what people will do with 80 cores. I'm confident in predicting that they'll find ways to use every bit of that capacity and demand more.
Wow, good point. I bet Intel never once stopped to think about THAT.
I sincerely doubt this will make it anywhere near Fry's or CompUSA, assuming it launches in +5 years. Most likely academic, corporate (think of the old days and mainframe number crunchers on wallstreet), and scientific.
Simply cheap teraflops for custom applications.
Of course, everyone thought it was a great idea when Cell announced they could do 64 or more cores. But since this is
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The costs to make use of 80 cores (you're going to need hugely complex chips and hugely complex memory buses) mean that these chips will be severe overkill for PCs and will be outside any typical user's price range. They're only going to be useful for a a few servers in very niche applications. If there's only demand for, say, 10,000 of these chips in the world then they're going to be extremely expensive.
I smell marketing horseshit. I think they're just saying this to get people to start thinking of multi-core options. Most people don't see the need for multi-core (even 2 core) systems. By saying you'll get 80 cores in 5 years makes people start thinking that they should start using 2 or 4 cores now.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'm not sure this is 80 general-purpose processing cores: the article claims that there are "80 floating point cores". Clearly, the big selling points of the chip are, in Intel's view, its data transfer at 1 TB/sec, and its floating point speed at 1 TFLOP.
An 80-core chip with RAM attached directly to the processor chip, as TFA discusses, is going to have an advantage in transferring data between cores, and plus it'll probably be a lot smaller. Than 40 dual core (or 20 quad core) chips.
Why oh why won't Intel spend their research dollars on something useful, like a bus architecture that can actually keep up with present performance levels?
Yes, because if Intel is working on one thing, that means they can't work on anything else at all anymore...
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Moore's law states that transistor density doubles every 24 months, it says nothing about speed or number of cores.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
80-core CPUs = cheaper "low-end" 16-core ones
not 80 general purpose integer cores. They're essentially copying the Cell design with large numbers of DSPs each of which has a local store RAM burned onto the main chip. Is this a good idea? Guess we'll find out with the Cell. What interests me most about this announcement is not the computing potential from such a strategy, but that it's an obvious response to IBM and Sony technology.
This is the last 3 years of Intel, all over again. Only now the megahertz race is replaced with the multi-core race.
Intel will create the "CoreScale" technology and make 4, then 8, then 16 cores and up while their competitors are increasing operations per clock cycle per watt per core. Consumers won't know any better, so they will buy the Intel 64-core processor that runs hotter and slower than the cheaper clone chip that has only 8 cores. Then when Intel starts runs up against a wall and gets their butt-kicked they will revert to the original Core 2 Duo design and start competing again.
Oh, and I predict that AMD will release a new rating called the "core plus rating" so their CPUs will be an Athlon Core 50+ meaning it has the equivalent of 50 cores. Queue n00bs who realize they have only 8 cores and complain.
And to think I didn't like history in school. Maybe I just hadn't seen enough of it to understand.
Software hasn't really improved for maaany years now, Spreadsheets and Word Processors are more colourful, higher resolution. But are these products smarter, better at all? Would a postgraduate write a better doctoral thesis with Office 2007 than with - say - Word 6.0? Is image manipulation thaat much better with the latest photoshop than with PS 5.5? With some minor exceptions the answer is clearly no.
- We were promised Virtual Reality with VR Helmets more than 10 years ago - is this _just_ a matter of hardware?
- Smart voice recognition? Anyone tried it lately? Anyone tried to write pretty standard letters with it? Desastrous.
- Intelligent assistents, understanding the user's needs? Operating system/application wizards that improve it's capabilties while you're working with 'em?
The applications are missing, they're faster, more colourful, higher resolution, antialiased... but still DUMB.
Computers are already pretty powerful, please start and make the software smarter, not faster.
CPU power is not that important anymore.
or find out what smalltalk or even prolog is really about...
In the 80s and early 90s, most of the bus speed limitations were due to capacitance issues (ie. how fast can we switch a transistor and discharge the capcaitance). We can make things faster by reducing capacitance through various measures. Now memory buses and speed are now getting so fast that they're starting to get constrained by the speed of light etc so it is getting harder to find large multiplier improvements.
I think there is still a lot of room for new stuff, maybe twice or four times what we have now. The biggest impovements that can be made, however, are in power reduction etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Er, I wasn't pointing to any particular multiplier. I was pointing out that, even if you are right that, when released, these would be prohibitively expensive for most purchasers, that history suggests that processors go from "prohibitively expensive for most user", to "common", to "you really need to upgrade that old piece of crap" pretty quickly.
Is image manipulation thaat much better with the latest photoshop than with PS 5.5? With some minor exceptions the answer is clearly no.
Hah! I am forced to disagree in the strongest possible terms..
Speaking as a former production artist and current art director, the last couple of generations of graphics software have introduced powerful tools that streamline my workflow in ways I find it hard to even fathom. Ok, let's talk about Illustrator, for example. From 10 -> CS Adobe added in-application 3D rendering of any 2D artwork onto geometric primitives. This is something I used to either have to fake, or take out of the application and into a 3D renderer in order to render simple bottle/can/box packaging proofs. Marketing wants to make a copy change? Make the change to the 2D art and the 3D rendering is updated in real time. Oh, and the new version of InDesign recognizes that the art has been updated and reloads it into the brochure layout. Automatically.
This is just one feature out of literally hundreds. This one alone saves me an hour or two a day. Seriously, there are projects I can take on today that would have been unthinkable 5 years ago. Pre-press for a 700 page illustrated book project has gone from a week of painful, tedious work down to 30 minutes, of which 20 is letting the PDF render. Seriously.
Here's the thing, unless you use a piece of software all day, every day, you're really not in any position to comment on how much it has or hasn't changed.
Photoshop (et. al.) are software for professionals, despite the number of dilettantes out there using them for sprucing up their MySpace page.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
When will Intel fix their floating point issue?
Is 1994 soon enough for you?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
ust as Gates couldn't imagine what anyone would want with more memory than 640KB, we can't imagine what people will do with 80 cores. I'm confident in predicting that they'll find ways to use every bit of that capacity and demand more.
He wasn't asking what 80 cores are good for. He's asking why we need 80 cores on one chip. As opposed to 40 dual-core processors, for example. And it's a good question. I imagine that these 80 cores can communicate extremely fast between their nearest neighbors. This could be amenable to implementing mesh-based parallel algorithms. Maybe toss in a couple hundred K of local RAM for each core, or shared blocks of RAM for every 4 cores, or whatever. Or maybe the core interconnections are arranged in a hypercube... Or imagine a super-hypercube configuration where each node of the hypercube is an 80-core mesh, to develop hybrid mesh/cube algorithms. Cool stuff.
Power requirements for a single, 80 core CPU are probably going to be much less than 40 dual-cores, as well.
40 dual processor virtual machines in a single box? Slap on some hardcore storage and networking, and it's a datacenters whet dream.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
n SGI study years ago indicated that 20 CPUs was roughly the upper limit before the cache synchronization load became the bottleneck. That number changes somewhat with the hardware technology, but a workable 80-way shared-memory machine seems unlikely.
/. knew about it, we would undoubtedly already have it. Intel makes big bucks for a reason.
Years ago, if someone told me that the 386 family would evolve into what we have today, I would have called them morons, but things progress. Moreover, if this technology were obvious enough that some random poster on
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