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Intel To Ship 48-Core Test Systems To Researchers

Posted by timothy on from the but-one-link's-enough-really dept.

MojoKid writes "Just when you thought your 6-core chip was the fastest processor on the planet, Intel announces plans to ship systems equipped with an experimental 48-core CPU to a handful of lucky researchers sometime by the end of the second quarter. The 48 cores are arranged with multiple connect points in a serial mesh network to transfer data between cores. Each core also has on-chip buffers to instantly exchange data in parallel across all cores. According to Sean Koehl, technology evangelist with Intel Labs, the chip only draws between 25 and 125 watts."

5 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Tilera by loufoque · · Score: 3, Informative

    Might as well buy a Tilera if it's for research...
    The only good thing about x86 is that it runs legacy Windows programs, but who cares about that in research?

  2. Correction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Just when you thought your 6-core chip was the fastest processor on the planet, Intel announces plans to ship systems equipped with an experimental 48-core CPU to a handful of lucky researchers sometime by the end of the second quarter.

    Actually, the 8-core (Nehalem EX) and 12-core (Opteron "Magny-Cours") CPUs are already faster than your 6-core CPU. And oddly enough, this 48-core CPU is actually slower than your 6-core, 8-core, or 12-core CPUs. Intel didn't design the 48-core CPU to sell it. They did it as a research project/experiment to develop new ways of interconnecting so many processing cores. While there are technically 48 cores they are far less complex and slower performing than anything that Intel is shipping retail. If you go back a year or two you can find articles where Intel unveiled the CPU and talked about performance. This is simply an exercise in massively parallel CPU design, not an effort to make a faster CPU. That's why they are shipping them to researchers, so they can study and learn how to develop uses for such massively parallel systems.

  3. AMD already has this... by Skaven04 · · Score: 3, Informative

    AMD's new 12-core "Magny-Cours" Opteron parts will be available in 4P configurations with 48 cores and up to 512GB RAM, so...::yawn::

    --
    ---- Breakbeats are not just music...they're the soundtrack for my life.
    1. Re:AMD already has this... by Skaven04 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually 768GB RAM...12 dimms per socket (if an OEM chooses to max out the config) with 16GB DDR3 dimms == 768GB.

      --
      ---- Breakbeats are not just music...they're the soundtrack for my life.
  4. Re:48 cores by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually, 4 DDR3 memory controllers, each of which can independently talk to a bank of DDR3 memory.