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?

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.

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.