The Economics of Chips With Many Cores

meanonymous writes "HPCWire reports that a unique marketing model for 'manycore' processors is being proposed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers. The current economic model has customers purchasing systems containing processors that meet the average or worst-case computation needs of their applications. The researchers contend that the increasing number of cores complicates the matching of performance needs and applications and makes the cost of buying idle computing power increasingly prohibitive. They speculate that the customer will typically require fewer cores than are physically on the chip, but may want to use more of them in certain instances. They suggest that chips be developed in a manner that allows users to pay only for the computing power they need rather than the peak computing power that is physically present. By incorporating small pieces of logic into the processor, the vendor can enable and disable individual cores, and they offer five models that allow dynamic adjustment of the chip's available processing power."

Comments

same old as software rental...

[k-zed]

I don't want to "rent" the processing power of my own computer, thank you. Nor do I want to "rent" my operating system, or my music, or movies. I buy those things, and I'm free to do with them as I wish.

Renting your own possessions back to you is the sweetest dream of all hardware, software and "entertainment" manufacturers. Never let them do it.

Re:same old as software rental...

[ozmanjusri]

Life just sucks that way

Microsoft != Life.

Requires a near-monopoly

[Ed Avis]

In mainframes you have pretty much a single vendor (IBM). Even in the days of Amdahl and Hitachi, once you were committed to a single vendor they had a lot of market power over you. So the vendor can set its own price, and squeeze as much money out of each customer as possible by making variable prices that relate to your ability and willingness to pay, rather than to the cost of manufacturing the equipment.

In a competitive market where 100-core processors cost $100 to produce, a company selling 50-core crippled ones for $101 and 100-core processors for $200 would quickly be pushed out of business by a company making the 100-core processors for $100 and selling them, uncrippled, for $101. I expect the Intel-AMD duopoly leaves Intel some scope to cripple its processors to maintain price differentials (arguably they already do that by selling chips clocked at a lower rate than they are capable of). But they couldn't indulge in this game too much because customers would buy AMD instead (unless AMD agreed to also cripple its multicore chips in the same way, which would probably be illegal collusion).

Compare software where you have arbitrary limits on the number of seats, incoming connections, or even the maximum file size that can be handled. It costs the vendor nothing more to compile the program with MAX_SEATS = 100 instead of 10, but they charge more for the 'enterprise' version because they can. But only for programs that don't have effective competition willing to give the customer what he wants. Certainly any attempt to apply this kind of crippling to Linux has failed in the market because you can easily change to a different vendor (see Caldera).

Re:Requires a near-monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair to the graphics companies, they sometimes at least did that because of relatively low yields. If you can take a chip that has ten pipes, two of which are faulty, and disable those two faulty pipes, you've effectively created an eight pipe chip for nothing. This reduces the overall cost of producing a single chip, because a partial failure is still usable.

This is also why Sony used a Cell with only seven SPUs instead of the eight designed on the chip: if a single SPU fails (which is much more likely than none) in test, the chip is still usable. It pushes up yields significantly.

IOW: you're comparing the wrong business model. The model you're describing is "oh, this chip isn't quite up to spec, let's put it in a lower spec card where it will meet the spec", rather than "let's sell a fully capable chip deliberately crippled, and re-enable the crippled part later if the customer pays for it."

Re:Requires a near-monopoly

[ElDuque]

That's a common misconseption there - prices in a competitive market are based on the consumer's willingness to pay, and nothing else. The cost of manufacturing equipment would only come into play in a monopoly situation, where the seller is able to "set" prices (because she will be sure to set them higher than her per-unit production costs.)

This is the same misconseption people often apply to baseball player salaries - they do NOT drive ticket prices. Baseball ticket prices are set at the highest level the market will bear - a price that is determined as consumers make decisions between countless sources of entertainment and leisure.

What is confusing is that the quality of a product (and therefore the market demand for it, sometimes) is often related to the cost of production, so it looks like production costs set prices. But remember when Homer designed a car? It was $80,000, and no one wanted to buy it at that price! The consumers decided there were better uses for their car-buying dollars. This is a perfect (although fictional) illustration of why costs != prices in a competitive market.

Re:You know what I don't get?

[lintux]

You know what I still don't get? Why's everyone acting like dividing a CPU into several separate cores is a good thing?

AFAIK adding more MHz was getting more and more complicated, so it was time to try a new trick.

Do I understand this right?

[Dr. Spork]

TFA is written really badly, but from what I gather, the "more advanced" models of figuring out how much to charge for chips goes like this:

1. Everybody gets the same chip, but it will be crippled unless you pay the highest price.

2. Everybody gets the same uncrippled chip, but there's a FLOPS meter on it that phones home, and you pay Intel according to the amount of numbercrunching your chip did for you.

Both of these models seem completely retarded to me, although the first is already sort of in use in the CPU/GPU market. Have modern processors overshot our needs by so much that our big worry now is to find innovative ways to cripple them? If so, maybe this processor war we're fighting is ultimately not even worth winning.

Re:Why?

[Anne Thwacks]

Because in reality, it costs $4.99 to make the chip, and $10,000,000 to design it.

The cost of designing one core is the same as the cost of designing 10 or 100 cores, because copy and paste was invented several years ago. The cost of adding a core to the design is about 1%.

There might be a case for powering down unused processors to save energy, and there is a case for selling cheaper processors with reduced core counts where some cores don't work, but there is no case for disabling working processeors for economic reasons.

Sun's Niagra technology differs, cos it has "virtual cores" which gives you more virtual cores but slower. Its very good if you multi-thread (run apache) and p*ss- poor if you dont (run Windows).

Re:How is this [business model] new?

[argiedot]

Now, explain to me again why it would be in my best economic interest to buy a computer with cores that could be disabled if I don't pay my rent? I suppose because you could just buy the ones with some cores disabled and get someone who knows stuff to enable them again, like the way people did for some of the older nVidia cards that had some things disabled. Or maybe I don't know anything about how the two things work.

STOP TAGGING whatcouldbpossiblygowrong ALREADY

[quitte]

really. STOP IT!

Crippleware...

[Bert64]

This is crippleware, and a terrible idea for the average consumer...
Paying more for a product that costs the same to produce, or potentially even less because they don't have to disable the extra cores is a terrible rip off, and it happens already...

The same people who currently overclock, will buy the cheaper cpus with cores disabled and re-enable them... You will also get third parties who make a business out of doing the same, tho without the "exceeding design spec" risks of overclocking.

Personally, I will never pay more for a more expensive version of the same product, i will buy the cheapest available just as soon as people have worked out how to re-enable the disabled cores, and i will help my less technical friends do the same.

Dude... wait, what?

[The Master Control P]

So Intel is going to design a CPU with N cores on it, then add hardware that disables half of them, then manufacture the chip with all N cores and sell it for less, even though it actually costs more to design/build because of the added hardware to cripple it, then try and make us pay for access to the other half of the cores and hope we don't notice that our computers have suddenly become a constant expense instead of a one-time purchase?

And moreover, they apparently forgot which problem they're trying to solve between paragraphs 4 and 5. They start talking about the real problem of many cores creating a very large space of core/memory architectures that would be difficult to choose between and support. Then they veer off into the rent-your-own-hardware-back-to-you idea and never finish reasoning out just how it would work before they come back. A few minor things they ignored:

• How do they turn cores on? Difficult level: No, you can NOT have a privileged link through my firewall onto my network.
• How do they stop me from hacking it and enabling it all myself? Difficulty level: Mathematically impossible since you can't stop Eve from listening if Eve and Bob are the same person.
• How do they propose to bill me? Difficulty: No, I will NOT let my CPU spy on me.
• Why should I hand you everything you need to force me to upgrade against my will?
• What happens if you go out of business and leave me stranded?
• Even if you don't see what's wrong with charging me continually to access my own hardware, do you actually think I won't?

In conclusion, Profs. Sloan & Kumar of the University of Illinois, I believe the premises and reasoning behind your proposal to be flawed, and the proposal itself to be unworkable and contradictory to openness in computing. Or, as we say on the Internet, wtf r u doin???

Re:How is this [business model] new?

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally, unlocked or overclocked pc parts burn out faster than if they'd been left alone (e.g. the 6800LE I mentioned died a horrible death, and now doesn't work at all). However if the chip was DESIGNED to be able to be unlocked, it would be perfectly safe.

Design is one. Manufacturing is two. Chip manufacturing is not perfect. It is more likely that the disabled parts failed full test, but that parts were still working (and thus make it sellable as a downgraded chip). All you did was enable the defective parts. And then it blew. No surprise there.

Re:You know what I don't get?

[Antity-H]

noone is chump enough to make something totally different that nothing runs on.
I guess that's why IBM did not develop the cell processor which is therefor not used in PS3s or why no supercomputer is built using it.

All this also explains why IBM did not develop a new product line of cell based blade servers. And neither are grids being built around cell based servers.

Of course even if IBM did develop it and sony did use it in the PS3, it would be unable to run anything which is why there isn't any game for the PS3 or why there are not linux distribution for the PS3.

Sorry, but a different architecture doesn't mean nothing runs on it, nor does it mean noone will develop for it if the promised power is cheap and proficient enough.