Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

3 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Larrabee by TheKidWho · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I believe this is the remnants of Intel's failed Larrabee chipset which was supposed to compete with Nvidia and ATI.

    A nice article on the story behind Larrabee and it's failure:
    http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/10/12/an-inconvenient-truth-intel-larrabee-story-revealed.aspx

    1. Re:Larrabee by jmknsd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      No, actually It is basically a bunch of Pentium 3s with cache coherency removed for a small chunk of on chip RAM, and a message passing interface for inter core communication. It has alot of interesting features, and is more usable than the 80 core chip they came out with a few years ago.

  2. Re:I just have to ask by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes, I can think of the possibilities...

    A Jaguar (or Roadrunner) of these processors would still be too slow to numerically solve the geomechanics problems I grapple with daily though. A Jaguar equipped with these processors would be approximately 20 petaflops peak. To simulate 1 sec of fracture of a 10mm cube of rock on the atomic scale would require of order 10^36 floating point operations. To do that would take 10^20 sec at 10 petaflops. Not bad really...that's only 10^12 years. Oh wait, the universe hasn't even been around that long...

    Having said that I'm a researcher who writes and uses high-performance parallel software daily. How might I become one of Intel's select few to trial these chips? I can certainly think of ways to keep them warm!

    Please Intel please! ;)