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.

Comments

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it run Linux?

Re:But...

[Nom du Keyboard]

Does it run Linux?

Yeah. 80 different distributions at once.

cue

[russ1337]

Cue the 'needed to run Vista' jokes....

Re:cue

[NickCatal]

Finally I can realize my dream of playing 500 instances of Quake 3 on one machine!

Re:cue

[Ngarrang]

Oh, I get it! You spell "Microsoft" with a "$" replacing the "s" because Microsoft likes money! Then you write some shallow technical-sounding drivel around it to legitimize your flagrant adolescent fanboyism as Slashdot's trademark pseudo-intellectual circle-jerk! Clever! Karma was meant to be burned, not whored.

Older Story

[Maddog Batty]

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...

Re:Older Story

[timeOday]

Sure would be nice to have a play with it once they have worked out how to program it...

It's very likely you can get one at Best Buy before they have worked out how to program with it. The fact is, current programming paradigms simply aren't suited to fine-grained parallelism - and in saying that, I don't mean to imply that such a paradigm can definitely exist. Sure there are many parallel research languages, but whether those could be adopted by mainstream programmers and used to achieve anywhere near linear speedup on mainstream applications is an open issue. Even the PS3, which is oriented to media applications which are relatively easy to parallelize, is getting little benefit from its measly half dozen computational units.

But with single-thread performance growth at a virtual standstill, Moore's law is going to result in exponential growth in the number of cores, whether or not we're ready to write software for them.

I wonder if we won't move towards a more "biological" paradigm - massive parallelism, but with massive redundancy and therefore inefficiency from a computational standpoint, but also robustness to hardware and software bugs.

IA64

[AvitarX]

I remember when IA64 was the next huge supercomputer on a chip 5 years off.

It didn't work out too well for Intel.

Re:IA64

[ciroknight]

I remember when Pentium was the next huge chip from Intel that was a few years off.

I guess we all know how that one turned out.

Re:IA64

[timeOday]

Itanium is doing ridiculously badly. Intel and HP will never recoup the billions they invested through sales of big iron alone.

It may be known as "a teraflop", but...

[91degrees]

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.

Re:It may be known as "a teraflop", but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The measurement is "FLOPS". Floating Point Operations Per Second. But that spells "FPOPS".

If we're going to be speaking strictly, get it right:

FLoating point Operations Per Second

Re:It may be known as "a teraflop", but...

[KIFulgore]

Trickses flopses... precious...

Re:It may be known as "a teraflop", but...

[fitten]

Actually... I think it's more FLoating Point OPerations per Second.

One floating point operation (say, an add), is a FLOP, not a FLO. Just like a No OPeration is a NOP (alternatively, NOOP, but assembly mnemonic is almost always NOP). If you want to know the rate at which a processor executes FLOPs, you say that it computes at X FLOPS.

beowulf cluster?

[Anonymous Coward]

can you imagine.

Re:beowulf cluster?

[jollyreaper]

beowulf cluster?

can you imagine. Yeah, man. Or what if Intel codenamed their next processor Beowulf? *inhales, holds breath, exhales slowly, smoke twisting lazily* Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulfs or did I just blow your mind?

Deja vu all over again

[$RANDOMLUSER]

"Intel CEO promises to deliver magical new uber processor within five years".

Stop me if you've heard this one before...

Re:Deja vu all over again

[Fozzyuw]

"Intel CEO promises to deliver magical new uber processor within five years".

Great now, I have to wait five years before I buy my next computer because nothing else will compare unless it's got 80 cores. My duel core looks soooo small now. =(

core 2 duo has a higher transistor density?

[doombringerltx]

Intel used 100 million transistors on the chip, which measures 275 millimeters squared. By comparison, its Core 2 Duo chip uses 291 million transistors and measures 143 millimeters squared. Maybe its just because I haven't had my morning coffee yet, or is that a typo?

Re:core 2 duo has a higher transistor density?

[Andy Dodd]

80 cores means there are probably quite a lot of on-chip interconnects between the cores.

Re:core 2 duo has a higher transistor density?

[imsabbel]

Core2 has 2 or 4 Mbyte l2 cache. 1 bit cache is 6 transitors == more than 200 of those 291 million transistors are high-density cache. (Density of cache is a lot higher than that of logic, which the 80 core cpu nearly solely is made of).

(Btw, i fucking HATE the "millimeters squared" expression. Its square millimeter. 275 mm squared would be more than 65 cm^2.)

Frak everything, we're doing 80 blades

[jollyreaper]

I'm sorry but when I see these competitions I always come back to this Onion piece. A classic.

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.

Re:Frak everything, we're doing 80 blades

[jollyreaper]

I find this even funnier:

http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/14/news/fortune500/gi llette/ [cnn.com] Well shit, they should just rename the Onion to The Daily Prophet. Remember that little bit they did about Bush after the first time he was (s)elected, "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Over?" http://www.godlessgeeks.com/BushNightmare.htm Here it is with links to all the jokes that came true. Shit!

Not only a dupe... but of an old story

[CajunArson]

It must be a really slow news day. From the dateline:

Published: February 11, 2007

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.

Imagine a...

[simong]

oh.

AMD's response

[drgonzo59]

This is a nice move by Intel. I wonder what AMD's plans are...81 cores?

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!

Re:AMD's response

[Hoi Polloi]

Kilts becomes AMD CEO:

81 cores? Fuck that! We're going to 100 cores and putting a goddamn window on the CPU so all of the fan boys can watch the electrons flow. Then we're going to put the ethernet connection DIRECTLY on the chip. Ya, you heard me right, a connector right on the damn chip. You disagree? Great, I need your soon to be empty cube to store my prototypes you pussy.

Wait! Brace yourself, I've got another one. A speaker slapped onto the CPU. You hear that? That is the sound of genius and of every command to the CPU being broadcast. The bling-bling crowd will eat that shit up like a cupcake at a fat camp. Let Intel suck on THAT for a while.

Ob

[rlp]

In Soviet Russia, Intel's 80 core processor imagines a Beowolf cluster of you!

For the love of god...

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:For the love of god...

[ciroknight]

"This isn't a general purpose processor."

...Yet. You're right in the fact that these cores are incredibly simplistic, so much so that they make DSPs look functional, but really what's going on here is a science project to develop the on-chip network, not to develop the CPU cores as much. Intel envisions lifting the networking component out of this design and applying it to various different cores, so that a general computing core can be mixed in with DSP cores and other "Application Specific Accelerator" cores.

So no, this model you're not going to be running Firefox or your text editor on (in fact, I doubt you even _could_ do this, these cores currently are very, very stripped down in their capacity to do work, to where they're basically two MACs tied to a small SRAM and a "network adapter"), but never-say-never, this style of chip is right around the corner.

Not usefull yet..

[CockroachMan]

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.

It's possible...

[mbessey]

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.

transistor density?

[twitter]

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.

Re:Dude....

[jollyreaper]

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? If you could work Grendel's mom into a Beowulf cluster of Grendels, you might just have aced the German pr0n market. For Japan, add tentacles. And if you can reverse the expected subject/verb/object order, you might have a market in Soviet Russia to boot.

I'm getting tired of the ancient computer comparis

[dj42]

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.

That's why we need 80 cores.

[jd]

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.