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.

Comments

Why have 8 strong ox?

[chroot_james]

When you can have 80 underfed chickens?

Make each core specialized!!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going to have 80 cores on a chip ..specialize some of the cores. Ie, have a few physics processors, a couple of graphics processors, maybe one dedicated to search tree retrievals even. One or two that are highly media centric. So basically 64 cores for general purpose CPU and the other 16 for known common tasks such as graphics and hdtv/media processing.
This would eliminate the need for a separate graphics card for the average business person and bring down costs.

Then, 80 cores should be enough for most people(TM).

For home PC's another option would be to have a Gigabyte of L2 cache, so that you are able to store the entire operating system image right next to the CPU. That would probably speed things up more than 8 cores would.

Whoop-de do. More rethinking is needed.

[Anonymous Coward]

With 80 friggin cores, you'd darn well better get the architecture right. But that's unlikely to happen beyond the memory subsystem.

What REALLY needs to happen is to rearchitect the IO subsystems. Ala the (gasp, heresy!) mainframe enviroment. And before you go writing off that idea, consider that mainframes can handle 65535 separate IO devices. Refer to the article on IBM's channel architecture if you're interested. As everyone knows, a PC is lucky if it can handle 65 devices.

The PCI and Hypertransport approaches just won't cut it. Radical thinking (or reinventing, more likely) is needed with this kind of horsepower.

If Intel, or AMD, ever figures out how to handle that type of IO, instead of the rediculously small number of devices PC's are currently limited to, THEN we'll see a real shake up in this industry.

Lots of uses for 80 processors

[gsfprez]

I'm a video guy. I can't render video fast enough. I can't do transcoding fast enough. My video is getting larger and deeper in color, and i need more power.

all of that is threadable.

so is photographic processing. You can divide a picture 80 ways and have each processor do whatever it is you want to do on it.

Gamers? Fscking a.... i'm so SICK of hearing hiow everything is for them. Just because something isn't going to help Halo Life 3 run faster is not any of my concern.

There are lots of people working on their computers that want to see more cores because it will make our lives better.

Re:80 Submissions

[kabocox]

That is true. A lot of applications do not heavily use multithreading. But, in the scientific community a lot of applications require it.

If anything, this will be the one great thing to come out of 8+ core desktop systems. I honestly don't think "most" apps even pretend to use more than 1 core very well. Once 8+ cores are one your bare bones Dell home PC then I'd expect to see everything under the sun start to be multithreaded. With the expectation of 32+ or 64+ cores in a decade time, then I could see alot of those little downloadable apps actually being designed to run in the background on just any given core. I'm actually eager to see some of the programming shifts that would take place because of this. From what I've read mostly /. is concerned about the memory bus not beening wide or fast enough to feed an 80 core chip. I'm more interested in "background" processes or algorithms designed just to load and run back there and only occasionally talk with other chips. I'm not worried that we can't figure it out. I'm kinda disappointed that we'd have to have 80+ cores out for a decade or so before we really even start to scratch the surface of what we can do with them. Right now, everyone is thinking of hey you can't breakevery problem into parallel tasks. Well, what if we make an algorithm breakthrough that says we can? But we only find that out after having all that processing at hand? The good news is that all those supercomputer folks have been researching into this area for years. The bad part is that even they'll be surprised when your Joe Average CS person suddenly has access to that type of system. We don't know, yet what it'll really excel at. We'll figure it out after it is sold to 5% of the US public. ;)

Arrgghhh

[Usquebaugh]

Why is it that with intel talking about a radical change in consumer hardware the level of comments on /. is barely higher then that on AOL.

We have had multi processor machines for ages. This is not a sudden unknown. Look up transputer, connection machine, beowulf, cray. There is still ground to be covered but it's not unkown territory. The difference is this is intel, intel needs a big market to sell to.

This is not going to make significant difference to the end user, most of them will still write letters, calculate spreadsheets and browse the web. It might be enough to finally expose MS et al for what they have always been, the parasites.

Where this is going to hit home is in the realm of programming and OS.

Want to run an OS primarily designed for uniprocessing on a multi way architecture? Look at the issues Win&Lin have with SMP, limited to 16 processors I believe. Numa and beowulf are a different kettle of fish. So what will we have on these massive SMP architectures?

Programming, at last we might be getting out from under VonNuman. Progress might be possible after 30+ years of stagnation. The symbolic/functional languages are going to start to move forward. Hell we might even get to run on stack based cpus with energy reclamation automated :-) Of course a nice message passing symbolic language might score big.

But given then history of software we'll have a bunch of ignorant, loud mouth idiots running around telling everybody the one true way is Java with mutex and semaphores. PHBs will grab at the first thing that has enterpise written on it and is 'guaranteed'. Most programmers will code how they have always coded head down, ass up. The number of processors will double every two years and the speed of software will continue to halve in the same period.

Of course nobody will suggest that a staged conversion should take place. There will be all these reasons to throw everything away and start over. Because this time we'll get it right!

Re:80 Submissions

[m0nstr42]

How about due to the lack of code that takes advantage of the multiple processors? If you mainly use one heavy application that doesn't take advatage of more than one or two cores, then those other 78 are going to be bored (and not submitting their dupes to ./)!

I'm curious - supposing that the software existed to take advantage of it, would it be possible to design an operating system that used a vast number of cores in a radically different (and advantageous) way than we use one or two (or a few more) today? i.e. the kernel spawns several sub-kernels on different processors or clusters of processors, with each one set up to handle a very specific task. Is there really any advantage? In nature, large scale systems of simple agents tend to be able to accomplish complex tasks more efficiently than single agents or small groups.