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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. "

11 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Code Name is Offensive by Threni · · Score: 5, Funny

    > This post is copyrighted by Robert Nelson for the private use of his audience. Any other use of this post or of any pict

    Your sigfile is offensive. What have ye got against the Scots?

  2. Yet another cloud? by Mortiss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is everything called cloud these days? Yet another du jour buzzword. Is this really justified here?

    1. Re:Yet another cloud? by hibiki_r · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When it comes to marketing cliches, when it rains, it pours.

    2. Re:Yet another cloud? by ArsonSmith · · Score: 5, Funny

      Why can't it just be cloudy?

      sorry.

      --
      Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
  3. Great cost savings by joeflies · · Score: 5, Funny

    because now school administrators only have to install SETI@HOME on 100 48-core computers instead of 5000 standard computers.

  4. Synergy! by HRbnjR · · Score: 5, Funny

    This new Cloud processor should create synergies with my SOA Portal system and allow me to deploy Enterprise B2B Push based Web 2.0 technologies!

  5. 48 is sufficient for most Ph.D. dissertations. by reporter · · Score: 5, Interesting
    A big market for this chip is the computer-science department of 2nd-tier universities like the University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB).

    Unlike Stanford University, UCSB lacks the money to build a full-blown multiprocessor system. If UCSB had such a system back in the 1990s, then UCSB would likely have produced as much multiprocessor research as Stanford University.

    This 48-core processor chip, due to the fact that it will eventually be a commercial product mass-produced by the millions of units, will be economically cheap. This chip will enable UCSB to build or buy a cheap multiprocessor system.

    A bunch of graduate students is already salivating at the prospect. They are drooling.

  6. Re:Code Name is Offensive by powerlord · · Score: 5, Funny

    I thought a bangalore was a man portable explosive, telescoping lance used to take out pill boxes in WW2?

    That was an offshoot technology. They've finally got all the bugs ironed out and the CPU is much less prone to "uncontrolled exothermic reactions" then it use to be.

    --
    This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
  7. Re:Codenames by azrael29a · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Windows 12 by Rockoon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  9. Re:Meh. I'm holding out for a kilocore. by Curate · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think it's more likely we'll see kibicores and mebicores.