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Intel's "Terascale" Vision
Vigile writes, "Intel is pushing the envelope with its latest vision — 80 cores on a single processor. Dubbed 'Terascale' computing, Intel aims to bring low-powered, massively interconnected cores and unleash a new era in data-mining, media creation, and entertainment." For balance, read Tom Yager over at InfoWorld imploring AMD to stop at 8 cores while everybody gets the architecture right.
That is true. A lot of applications do not heavily use multithreading. But, in the scientific community a lot of applications require it. Where I work, we process several GB of MRI data a day. We are able to parallelize the overall processing, so the more processors, the better. However, I wish Matlab would become multithreaded! Our servers have 4 processors and if matlab used them all, we could process 1 dataset in 1/4 the time, instead of processing 4 datasets at once to utilize the CPUs. Processing one dataset at a time would reduce disk I/O.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
A lab prototype like this can help them with something important: Given multi-core processors look to be the way future computers will be built, how do you feed them data? The current paradigm won't scale past 4 cores on a single chip's worth of FSB, and there are folks who don't think that even 4's going to be a useful increase over 2.
Even if Intel never sells a chip bigger than 16 or 32 ways, an 80 core lab mule will teach them many things about how to get information to a processor and keep those caches full of appropriate data.
-F
Your comments are a lot more true than many people realize. Specialized hardware always wins.
As an example, people talk about using using multi-GHz machines for TIVO-type appliances, and "getting away" with 600 Mhz or so if your card has hardware MPG encoding. Some of the original TIVOs, because of their reliance on specialized chips and ASICs, used measly 33 MHz CPUs - and worked just fine.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
That didn't work because AMD worked out that architecture can trump speed. They innovated, and then did it again with decent dual-core (as in NOT the two-dies-on-one-chip cack that you churned out at first).
So, you improved your architecture and implemented dual-core properly, to produce the fantastic Duo. You got back in the race.
And then there was talk of more cores. And you went "Fuck that, bitches, stay DOWN - we is gon' fuck you up good with 80 cores, bitch, an' dat hard!". Yes, you decided to try and dominate the pissing contest of multi-core instead of megahurtz.
Jesus guys, didn't you learn a fucking thing? STOP trying to turn out something that little bit "more" than the competition, just get on with innovating and coming up with damn good chips. That's how AMD threatened you and, if you go on with this "anything you can do" shit again, you'll be back to square one.
Meta will eat itself
What's a memory bus? Oh right, that thing you use to access the DDR4 swap device when the page you want to access is no longer in the on-CPU RAM. ;-)
Seriously, look at the growth of L2 caches, and tell me the day isn't coming when they just call it "RAM" instead of "cache." If Intel and AMD want to keep piling transistors onto their chips, this'll give 'em something to do.
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if you read his article, you would know that he wants them to create cpus that actually perform in the real world, not just add marketing numbers that will have very little effect.