Intel To Ship 48-Core Test Systems To Researchers

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."

Comments

I just have to ask

[toygeek]

Can you imagine a *Beowulf cluster* of these things!? Think about the possibilities!

Re:I just have to ask

[Anonymous Coward]

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! ;)

Re:I just have to ask

[MrMr]

fracture of a 10mm cube of rock on the atomic scale
Ha, I can do that in less than a second, with my serial mallet.

Re:I just have to ask

[urusan]

It certainly beats the 10^13 years it would take with a Jaguar!

Re:I just have to ask

[Jurily]

Now 48 CPUs can wait for the disk!

Re:I just have to ask

[WrongSizeGlass]

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! ;)

Well, posting as AC certainly will help your chances.

Re:I just have to ask

[leromarinvit]

fracture of a 10mm cube of rock on the atomic scale
Ha, I can do that in less than a second, with my serial mallet.

You left out an important detail: 1 sec of fracture of a 10mm cube of rock on the atomic scale

Whoa! Chuck Norris has a Slashdot account?

Larrabee

[TheKidWho]

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

Re:Larrabee

[jmknsd]

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.

Re:Larrabee

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a particularly auspicious name for a chip. I'd assume that a "Bangalore" CPU would promise that it could get the work done twice as fast for half as much money due to "parallel architecture" - but you'd launch a program, only to discover that it actually took 10x as long, every instruction needed to be told *exactly* what to do, and the results were so full of errors that it took an additional non-Bangalore CPU working full time just to get things right.

bullshitter

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> Sean Koehl, technology evangelist
Oh... a bullshitter

640 C (cores) should be enough for everybody

[youn]

maybe that's what bill gates meant when he said 640K should be enough... K as in Core .. it was a spelling mistake;)

Re: 640 C (cores) should be enough for everybody

[selven]

With the kinds of things Bill Gates did, I don't know if even 640' C would be enough.

Can you imagine...

[EnsilZah]

...a Beowulf cluster of engineers awkwardly reading marketing information from a teleprompter?

Tilera

[loufoque]

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?

Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Correction

[mdwh2]

The fastest commercially available x86 chips have been a little under 4 GHz for about five years now.

Megahertz Myth. As far as I can tell, over the last 5 years individual cores have still been getting faster, just not with higher clock speeds.

Video reminds me of ...

[LoudMusic]

3DFX, so powerful it's kind of ridiculous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmaYH1F6kho

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldiYYJNnQUk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o72T8qQr7GE

Great ad campaign.

Chip trial

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

I'm an engineer at Intel and we are looking for a few more candidates to test our 48-core chips. Your scientific computing project sounds like a perfect fit for our trial. Please contact me (see my account info for my email address) and we'll get you in the program.

Cheers!

AMD already has this...

[Skaven04]

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::

Re:AMD already has this...

[Skaven04]

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

48 cores

[nurb432]

And still one external memory bus.

Re:48 cores

[Anonymous Coward]

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