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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."
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?
With the heavily threaded nature of BeOS, even demanding apps would really fly on the quad+ core cpus that are preparing to take over the world.
Not that you couldn't do threading right in Windows, OS X, or Linux. But BeOS made it practically mandatory: each window was a new thread, as well as an application-level thread. Plus any others you wanted to create. So to make a crappy application that locks up when it is trying to do something (like update the state of 500+ nodes in a list; ARD3 I'm looking at you) actually took skill and dedication. The default state tended to be applications that wouldn't lockup while they worked, which is really nice.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
In other news, Gillette pledges a razor with 81 micro blades. 80 blades are individually controlled via Intel's new 80 core processor. The 81st blade is available just because..
This will finally run Vista, right?
And get here ahead of it, so we'll be ready.
KFG
...Imagine a Beowolf cluster of those!
I never petaflop I didn't like.
Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have your way.
You fools! Do you have any clue how much Oracle licenses will cost for this thing?
A couple of things to mention here. Many years ago I read an Intel road map for the x86 processors. It was more than 10 years ago, less than 20 I think. In it they said they would have massively multicore processors coming along around now. They may have forgotten that and reinvented the goal along the way, companies do that. But, they really have been predicting this for a very long time.
:-) The counter example everyone came up with was, "well, if that is true why would AMD buy ATI?" The answer to that is simple, they want their patent portfolio and their name. In the short term it even makes sense to put a GPU and some shaders on a chip along with a few cores. At the point you can put 16 or so cores on a chip you won't have much use for a GPU.
The other thing is that with that many cores and all the SIMD and graphics instructions that are built into current processors it looks to me like the obvious reason to have 80 cores is to get rid of graphics coprocessors. You do no need a GPU and a bunch of shaders if you can throw 60 processors at the job. You do need a really good bus, but hey, not much of a problem compared to getting 80 cores working on one chip.
With that kind of computer power you can throw a core at any thing you currently use a special chip for. You can get rid of sound cards, network cards, graphics cards... all you need is lots of cores, lots of RAM, a fast interconnect, and some interface logic. Everything else is just a waste of silicon.
History has shown that general purpose processing always wins in the end.
I was talking to some folks about this just last Saturday. They didn't beleive me. I don't expect y'all to believe me either.
Stonewolf
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.