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:Code Name is Offensive

[girlintraining]

Intel an American company, with the American economy in the shape it's in, I am offended at the codename Bangalore.

First, I agree with you completely. That said, if the processor core is anything like the city it's named for...a 48 core processor on a mesh topology is a good digital analogy to Bangalore -- it is the 3rd most populous urban area in India. It'll also smell horrible, the electrons will be subject to depraved working conditions, and they'll be paid crap for their work, etc. Despite it being a so-called "economic powerhouse", only about 60k of its inhabitants have more than US $1 million net worth. It has over 5.8 million people living there. It makes the wage gap in this country look postively equalitarian.

Re:Advantages over just adding more FPUs?

[RotateLeftByte]

Imagine being able to run 48 copies of solitaire or Notepad at once?

Oh silly me. you can do that already.

Apart from Vidoe type apps this is a pure server type CPU but unless Intel can sort out the memory access there is going to be an awful lot of cache misses and waiting for data & code from RAM. Unless, it has 10Gb of L1 cache.

Re:Advantages over just adding more FPUs?

[Enderandrew]

What are you talking about? With 48 distinct cores, I can finally turn on Aero!