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Intel Shows Off 80-core Processor
thejakebrain writes "Intel has built its 80-core processor as part of a research project, but don't expect it on your desktop any time soon. The company's CTO, Justin Rattner, held a demonstration of the chip for a group of reports last week. Intel will be presenting a paper on the project at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week. 'The chip is capable of producing 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, known as a teraflop. That's a level of performance that required 2,500 square feet of large computers a decade ago. Intel first disclosed it had built a prototype 80-core processor during last fall's Intel Developer Forum, when CEO Paul Otellini promised to deliver the chip within five years.'" Update: 06/01 14:37 GMT by Z : This article is about four months old. We discussed this briefly last year, but search didn't show that we discussed in February.
Does it run Linux?
Cue the 'needed to run Vista' jokes....
Older story on this here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/ 26/1937237
Sure would be nice to have a play with it once they have worked out how to program it...
wot no sig
I remember when IA64 was the next huge supercomputer on a chip 5 years off.
It didn't work out too well for Intel.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It's known incorrectly.
The measurement is "FLOPS". Floating Point Operations Per Second. It's an acronym. The 'S' is part of the acronym. Hence even if you only have oneof them, it's still a FLOPS. And it's capitalised.
Strictly speaking it should be "trillion FLOPS" as well since it's not an SI unit but my pedantry is limitted.
can you imagine.
"Intel CEO promises to deliver magical new uber processor within five years".
Stop me if you've heard this one before...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
By James M. Kilts
CEO and President,
The Gillette Company
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That's three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades.
Sure, we could go to four blades next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a thicker aloe strip and call it the Mach3SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-blade game. Are they the best a man can get? Fuck, no. Gillette is the best a man can get.
What part of this don't you understand? If two blades is good, and three blades is better, obviously five blades would make us the best fucking razor that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the razor game by clinging to the two-blade industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, five blades is the biggest chance of all.
Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more blades in there. I don't care how. Make the blades so thin they're invisible. Put some on the handle. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!
You're taking the "safety" part of "safety razor" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make razor history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that five blades can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then fuck you. And if you're on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I'm the only one who'll take risks, I'm sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the five-blade razor becomes the shaving tool for the U.S. of "this is how we shave now" A.
People said we couldn't go to three. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Five's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at Norelco, working on fucking electrics. Rotary blades, my white ass!
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Bic's wake and make pens. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Bic is the day I leave the razor game for good, and that won't happen until the day I die!
The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, shaving with anything less than five blades is like scraping your beard off with a dull hatchet." Or "You'll be so smooth, I could snort lines off of your chin." Try "Your neck is going to be so friggin' soft, someone's gonna walk up and tie a goddamn Cub Scout kerchief under it."
I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which Gillette is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, five blades, sweet Jesus in heaven.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It's hard for me to be too impressed, witha specialised chip you can do almost anything, this isn't different from the claims from a small company that they can make chips run at 10GHz, oh, but it's not x86.
Build an x86 prototype one and I'll worship at the alter of Intel for years to come."Oh boy"
Not to mention that Slashdot (even Zonk) Covered this LAST YEAR.
But that's OK, I'm sure Slashdot gave insightful and cogent coverage of real events that actually matter to geeks on this site, you know, like the Release of a new major version of GCC
Oh wait.... that (like a bunch of other actually interesting stories) would be in the aptly-named, sir not appearing on this website category due to it not making enough banner revenue.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
oh.
Besides, with most software being single-threaded I don't know if a consumer will immediately need more than 4 cores for a while. I can still see software companies trying to come up with ways to keep all 80 cores busy..."Well, they need at least 20 anti-virus processes, 10 genuine advantage monitors, and we'll install 100 shareware application with cute little icons in the task bar by default. There, that should keep all the cores nice and warm and busy -- our job is done!".
But in all seriousness, I would expect some extremely realistic environmental physical simulations (realtime large n-body interactions and perhaps realtime computational fluid dynamics)...now that's something to look forward to!
Itanic, anyone?
How many Library of Congress' is that?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Itanium
In Soviet Russia, Intel's 80 core processor imagines a Beowolf cluster of you!
[Insert pithy quote here]
I wonder how long before our kids are singing,
100 cores on the chip on the wall, 100 cores on the chip
take one down, pass it around
99 cores on the chip on the wall....
Add 2 cores, you get 2x TFlops, add 4 -- get 16x, add 8 you get 256x TFlops. Why stop there, add 80 you get 2^80 = 1208925819614629174706176x more TFlops. Heck, add 1000 cores and you can simulate the universe! Well, I am putting my life's savings into Intel stock!
'The chip is capable of producing 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, known as a teraflop'
Should probably be "known as a teraflops".
You don't two fps, one fp either, right?
and all that is holy on this sacred Earth ...
This isn't a general purpose processor. Think "cell processor" on a larger scale. You wouldn't be running your firefox or text editor on this thing. You'd load it up and have it do things like graphics processing, ray tracing, DSP work, chemical analysis, etc...
So stop saying "we already don't have multi-core software now!!!" because this isn't meant for most software anyways.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It's useless to keep putting more cores into a processor when we still don't have a decent parallel programming paradigm.
80 cores is an absurd number, with the parallelism level that we have in today programs, most of the cores should be idle most of the time.
A transputer which was around in the 80s?
... Wonders... 20 years later... Patents...?
Hmm has it really taken 20 years of research or
Deleted
the article says that it won't run x86, i.e.: no XP/Vista, but if you look very closly at the picture of the what they showed at the demo, the XP taskbar appears to be at the bottom of the monitor. Hmmm.
Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The onion is wrong - they actually went to 6 blades. And no I'm not kidding. Yes, I am bending the truth a bit (the 6th blade is on the back of the razor, to try to slice your hand when you change the blades)
No, mine's bigger!
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
perl -e 'fork while 1;'
There ya go. Think of it as a benchmark. How long can the 80-core processor run that without dying?
I thought that was a little weird, too. But the 80-core chip could simply have more wires (and therefore, fewer transistors). Given that they mention that there are routing elements between the cores, it's possible that a lot of the chip's real estate is taken up by massive busses between adjacent cores.
Another explanation might be that they didn't want to waste the time/expense to come up with an optimized layout, or that they intentionally spaced things out to make testing easier.
Well, I don't think there's ever been an elecronic computer that took more than a second to manage a floating point operation. Hence, just say how many FLOPS you have. A trillion flops makes more sense to more people anyway. Not everyone knows the SI prefixes. Outside of electronics, even the Mega prefix is unusual.
"64 processors is enough for anybody!" >:(
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I guess that eventually they'll just fire up a whole 300mm wafer. It'll be cookin...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
my pedantry is limitted.
The average user won't notice. There's a threshold for everything, beyond which limits are meaningless.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If intel called the 80 cpu beast "Grendel", could it still be part of a Beowulf cluster? Or would it end up in a perpetual battle - cpu versus os - until the very fabric of the universe itself crumbled around us?
Over a decade and a half ago, in 1990, I programmed parallel AT&T DSP32C boards (multiple DSPs per ISA board in an 80386 host). Up to 5 25GFLOPS chips on a 125GFLOPS board, up to 8 boards in a 1TFLOPS host PC. That PC, nearly double the "decade ago", had over 1TFLOPS (including its FPGA glue) in about 3 square feet.
And it actually ran applications (commercial image processing) in the field. This Intel chip might be smaller than 3'^2, but it still needs to run in the same size PC, and it doesn't run any commercial apps. Even 17 years later, on twice the cores we had in 1990.
Sure, the past 17 years hasn't seen our parallelism innovations become common (though finally digital cameras are catching up to our 16Mpxl, but not at 40bit color). Because the same problem we didn't solve in general, parallel programming semantics and debugging that reuse existing codebase and techniques, is still hard. But if we'd discarded the uniprocessor codebase then, or just ignored it as we built a new, parallel codebase, we'd have 17 years of code now that would be "legacy" which didn't largely lock us, and our thinking, out of simple multiprocessing development.
So I hope that Intel's multicore development is really just a platform for developing parallel coding systems. I'd love to see all that Intel money and brains put behind "executable UML", or some other flow "language", by inventing "lossless" lexical/graphical interconverters and expression standards. But they'll probably spend it all on marketing and emulating an 80386 to run Windows. Because that's the part of our 1990 platform that can be reinvented and resold as "brand new", just like it was back then, without taking much of a risk.
--
make install -not war
...Beowulf cluster of these...
"Sockets are the standard networking API, also useful for stopping your eyes from falling onto your cheeks" zeromq.org
also does it have a ram controller build in?
80 cores means there are probably quite a lot of on-chip interconnects between the cores.
There has to be a typo hiding in there, but the whole thing is an empty set. It's hard to believe they can make 80 cores with 100E6 transistors when it take 261E6 transistors to make two. Each core would have less than a million transistors in the 80 core model. You have to go all the way back to the 486 to see that kind of count from Intel. It's possible because the cores are not x86, there's no "ability to use memory" and ... it's vapor ware. For the practical significance, they might as well have photographed a box of Pentiums and called it useful because Open Mosix does auto clustering and there are live CD versions. You've got a better chance of computing something with the box of Pentiums.
Bus space is not likely to be an issue either. It does not show up in this image of the cell processor.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
And I'm not impressed by the Flop rate. Not with the Cell Processor already out for a year.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Intel has found a useful argument they could give to illustrate their newest
" s/number of GHz/numer bor cores/ "
marketing propaganda.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well, those shitty, basic computers that took up big rooms, remember those? No? Ok, well, if those were still here, this thing would be like 90239820 times smaller, cool huh? How many of those are we going to have to hear before we come up with some new kind of comparison. You know how fast a woman can plot a route around a detour using a map in a big city? Yeah? Well, this shit is like 939203902093902093092093 times faster.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
I'd love to know how they managed to scale up to 80way x86? IIRC anything passed 8way was diminishing returns?
With high end processor power consumption approaching the better part of a kilowatt, perhaps toasting speed could be a measure.
Clearly, there is a demonstrable need for news sites to process dupes faster and in parallel with other dupes. The reason this one took so long is because there isn't a high-speed dupe instruction on the older generations of processors.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
do you remember the 80286 (which had an extra year wait)? There are some of us here that do. Even the z80 was a bit late by making it a better 8080. I was not waiting for it (but coded on it), but I would guess that 1 or 2 ppl here did.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Of course we won't see an 80-core processor any day soon! Intel will produce "new chips" every couple years and just add cores. I suspect they have done this all along (e.g, the Pentium series). That is it makes sense from a capitalist standpoint to throttle your technology to generate or maintain a certain level of demand. I have no evidence for this, but as cynical as it sounds it sure makes sense.
of cheap 80-core Linux computers, all working together to solve problems.
...
We could model the weather patterns in the increased storms we're seeing
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
ought to be enough for anybody.
Seriously, why don't we put the cores into the memory DIMMs? It's been tried before but now it seems that a CPU core is just a little commodity thing, and memory bandwidth is where the bottleneck is.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Yikes, that's over 65 amps! Well, OK, it's less than 1 amp per core.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Nobody believed me when I mentioned in a previous story comment that I was playing with an 8-core HP test system. Everyone went "No Wai!" and this was about three months or so ago. Lookie here - 80 fucking cores.
Guess who's laughing now?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
its funny when you think about it. computer do evolves really fast. we always hear things like years ago a computer used to take up a huge space. now that i read this, i think i will be able to say to my kids (when i'll have some).. you know.. when daddy was young, we used to have Server Rooms with tones and tones of computers working to getter to crunch numbers, now you little gizmo's is 10time more powerful.
...to keep up with Sladot's dupes.
Thank you I'll be here all week.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
This article proves that the FLOPS is a useless unit anyway.
I call for a move to the (ft)^2.DOC - that's the "square foot of decade old computer".
Certainly a more suitable unit for today's LoC-savvy audience.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.