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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."

12 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. I just have to ask by toygeek · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --
    Nobodies Prefect
    Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
    1. 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! ;)

    2. Re:I just have to ask by MrMr · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

    3. Re:I just have to ask by Jurily · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Now 48 CPUs can wait for the disk!

    4. Re:I just have to ask by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

  2. 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:Larrabee by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

  3. 640 C (cores) should be enough for everybody by youn · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that :p
  4. 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.

  5. Chip trial by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  6. 48 cores by nurb432 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And still one external memory bus.

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    ---- Booth was a patriot ----