Intel Shows 48-Core x86 Processor

Vigile writes "Intel unveiled a completely new processor design today the company is dubbing the 'Single-chip Cloud Computer' (but was previously codenamed Bangalore). Justin Rattner, the company's CTO, discussed the new product at a press event in Santa Clara and revealed some interesting information about the goals and design of the new CPU. While terascale processing has been discussed for some time, this new CPU is the first to integrate full IA x86 cores rather than simple floating point units. The 48 cores are set 2 to a 'tile' and each tile communicates with others via a 2D mesh network capable of 256 GB/s rather than a large cache structure. "

Comments

Re:Advantages over just adding more FPUs?

[eabrek]

That's what each channel is. I forget exactly, but each DDR channel is almost 200+ pins (RDRAM was considered a big win because it is about 80). And pins == money (mainly in die area).

Re:Codenames

[azrael29a]

Why can companies not come up with decent code names. For instance, this would be the perfect case for it being codenamed "Beowulf".

They're using geographical names (cities, places, lakes, rivers) to avoid having to register the codename as a trademark. Geographical names can't be trademarked so no one will use your codename for his trademark.

Re:Windows 12

[Rockoon]

A mutex (MUTually EXclusive) is a software methodology in which one thread or process can (usually temporarily) lock a resource (such as a memory location) so that another thread or process may not access it.

It is most often required because resources are normally not 'atomic.' For instance, a string in memory is made up of many machine words and a CPU cannot read or write multiple machine word values in one operation. The danger is that while one CPU is writing to such a non-atomic collection of values, another might be trying to read from (or write to) it.. creating a situation where that second process reads part of the old data and part of the new data (essentially garbage data.)

So the idea of a MUTEX is born, in which an atomic value is leveraged to allow a thread to reserve such resources, signaling others (if they respect the MUTEX as well) to wait their turn.

Re:Advantages over just adding more FPUs?

[maraist]

What is worse is that theyve done away with cache coherence. So I dont think you can take a 48 thread mysql / java process and just scale it. You COULD use forked processes that don't share much. (ie postgres/apache/php).

Re:Advantages over just adding more FPUs?

[afidel]

The reason the i7 gains nothing going from double to triple channel memory is that the memory controller is power limited and so can only run at reduced clocking on triple channel configurations 800Mhz down from 1333Mhz. Of course for most workloads having 50% more data in RAM instead of glacially slow storage is a win =)