Slashdot Mirror
48-Core Chips Could Redefine Mobile Devices
CWmike writes "Intel researchers are working on a 48-core processor for smartphones and tablets, but it could be five to 10 years before it hits the market. Having a 48-core chip in a small mobile device would open up a whole new world of possibilities. 'If we're going to have this technology in five to 10 years, we could finally do things that take way too much processing power today,' said analyst Patrick Moorhead. 'This could really open up our concept of what is a computer... The phone would be smart enough to not just be a computer but it could be my computer.' Enric Herrero, a research scientist at Intel Labs in Barcelona, explained that with the prototype chip someone could, for instance, be encrypting an email while also working on other power-intensive apps at the same time — without hiccups. Same for HD video. Intel's Tanausu Ramirez said it could also boost battery life. 'The chip also can take the energy and split it up and distribute it between different applications,' he said. Justin Rattner, Intel's CTO, told Computerworld that a 48-core chip for small mobile devices could hit the market 'much sooner' than the researchers' 10-year prediction."
Let's put a 48-core processor on a desktop or laptop before we talk about tablets or phones...
will it include a car battery?
And a battery life of four fifths of a second!
And we can stop then because, well, you know, 640 cores should be enough for anyone.
Keep floggin' that dead Larrabee horse, Intel.
Given that even today's mobile phone SoCs have dedicated hardware "cores" for encryption, video encoding and decoding, etc, this is only Intel trying to generalise the functionality back into the CPU - which is pretty much all Intel know - rather than the more suitable, lower power, dedicated function blocks that are but pinheads even on today's SoCs, never mind the 10nm SoCs in years to come.
Today's quad-core mobile phone SoC on 32nm could be a 16-core cluster-on-a-chip on 16nm, and 64-cores on 10nm.
Never mind the compute-assist on the GPUs in these SoCs - Exynos 5 is over 70 GFLOPS for example, and supports OpenCL 1.1. Never mind the 4K video decode/encode support...
Sure, you could put the power of today's typical desktop in a phone with such a beast, but by then we should have desktop boxes with an order of magnitude more power than one - and we'll find a way to "need" that extra power on the desktop. It's not just about chip capability and battery life - I'm mean you can always plug in a phone and run it full power 24/7. But you start running up against the limits of thermal dissipation. It's no surprise that maximum TDP has not changed a whole lot on the desktop per processor. We're still limited by the ability to aircool a chip that's really a 130+/- watt heater. That won't change. Remember also that until you standardize a dock with a real video connector (or crazy fast wireless video - not this compressed crap we use for movies), you're still limited to that little tiny window on the portable device.
The biggest potential savings is if they can shut down 47 cores and run one thread at low power when I'm not "using" it so the battery lasts as long as possible.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Hmm. 48 cores. More processing power. Better battery life. And how large of a backpack will I need to transport those long-life batteries? Just trying to plan ahead.
had to be said.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Just before the AMD board executed him, Dirk Meyer screamed out: "MOAR COARZ!" And today we have Bulldozer.
The moral of the story is, MOAR != more all of the time. Especially in a freakin' cellphone, where, despite what some Slashdotters think, the primary use case is *not* performing massively parallel scientific simulations.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
What it can't do is pass a charging station.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Hah! The Parallela Kickstarter project was from a group that already had a 64 core CPU that consumed only a watt or 4 of power when running full-tilt. If this takes Intel 10 years to design they'll be left in the dust.
BTW, they wanted the money to fund developing the mask for the Fab technique needed to mass produce them for $100 apiece instead of the few hundred apiece they now cost to manufacture. The chips already exist.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
The phone would be smart enough to not just be a computer but it could be my computer.
Anyone have a clue what he means by "my computer"? All the computers I currently own and use are my computer already.
Not useful without a serious change in computer architecture.
Amdahl's law. It's a bitch, baby.
www.backwoodsengineer.com
Haven't we already been here? When multi-core processors first became widely available, I recall a study that showed that anything over 8 cores was counterproductive. First, very few people have enough background stuff running to need more processing power than that. Second, coordinating multi-tasking on multiple cores requires a lot of complex work by the operating system, unless you just dedicate one to each process (not to each thread - that opens up problems with cache and data consistency). The benchmarks on desktop computers showed that adding more than 8 cores to a general purpose system actually slowed the system down due to added OS overhead.
About the only way this many cores can be useful is for graphics processing (or, in TFA, video processing): many simple cores work in parallel for the same process, on different parts of the same data. This, of course, is what graphics chips already do for a living.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Modern phones already have many, many cores in them. They are just not general purpose cores available for use by the OS or applications.
For example the radios in phones are software defined, meaning they have an RF front end that just feeds the signal to a dedicated signal processing core to do decoding. They have at least one for the mobile network radio, one for WiFi, one for Bluetooth, one for NFC, one for GPS. The audio codec will have a signal processor that can do mixing, digital filtering and parametric equalization. The cameras will each have processors to handle some image processing before the data is handed to the main CPU.
You could combine all these cores into a single CPU, and then you would have the advantage of being able to use them for other things when they are not busy handling the aforementioned hardware. The problem is that these more general purpose cores tend to use a lot more power than dedicated ones designed specifically for one application, but presumably Intel things it will get the power budget down to something acceptable in 10 years time (or batteries will get a lot better).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Want to impress the pointy heads talk about more cores.
Throwing more cores is not the solution to all problems and actually opens up a whole bunch of new ones.
I wish that more attention would be spent to solve real problems rather than trying to be buzzword compliant.
The O/S supports the additional resources. Who has am O/S today that has a proven roadmap to get there?
Until you revise the whole way people write software, adding cores is useful to a very limited point. Today's software can be split at one core per thread, or one core per process. If you try to get two cores to work on the same thread, you just increase serial contention, not decrease it.
Even thread-happy Java is only working on maybe 3-5 threads at a time, the rest are sleeping until a device wakes it, or until a certain time has elapsed. A new compiler may be able to help a little bit, but it's just going to be creating very short-lived micro-threads when it detects those few opportunities for them.
Graphics hardware is great for many parallel cores, because it's the same tight problem with different data, endlessly repeated. Multiply these 4x4s please. Fill these pixels please. Endlessly. Same goes for encryption, and maybe a few bits of video game AI logic. Not many other software naturally fits to using many cores.
[
unless there is some breakthrough in battery life in the next 5-10 years, having a 48 core cpu run on a mobile device for 5 minutes before depleting is worthless.
Why does a cell phone need 48 processor cores? How about we force all the shitty mobile app developers to make shit work on one core before we throw 47 more at them to abuse with their terrible resource management skills.
being underrated is overrated.
Hope they'll have a bio-neural interface. I'll need one really bad by then.
Current phones do just fine with HD video and multitasking. Sure, some may glitch occasionally, but more due to software design than lack of CPU. This will do little to nothing for the things we use our phones for today.
What it will enable is new classes of features, such as real-time video and voice processing. With that sort of CPU power, you can do voice recognition without sending the audio over the network for analysis. Who knows what people will think of doing for video analysis?
Though for the most part, the added cores will be powered down, doing nothing but putting a good bragging number on the spec sheet.
Yeah, you'll be able to run 128 instances of Angry Birds! No wonder you're excited!
Core 1-12 : DRM
- these cores will check all audio/video/ebook files for copyright infringement
Core 13-24 : TPM
- these cores will implement TPM and secure the DRM portion
Core 25-37 : Genuine Advantage Checking
- these coes will check that the system state is valid, and all license keys are valid and updated
Core 38-40 : Virus Checking
- these cores will implement malware checks and virus checks
Core 41-47 : OS and Sandboxing/Security
- these cores will run the base os, and run all applications in sandbox mode
Core 48 : User Application
- this core will be available for running user applications in the performance reduced sandbox mode. Priority is given to cores 1-47, in order of decreasing priority.
My phone won't become my computer because it's not about the CPU power. Hasn't been for ages now. The average phone already has more CPU power than the average desktop user makes use of. It's more about:
So while more cores may help phones do phone-like things better, especially combined with nifty ideas like Google Glass, but it's not going to help the phone replace my desktop.
Sure, but how *fast* would these micro-cores run? Will we wind up with a single core not being able to handle anything on it's own?
Plus, adding more cores for shared tasks increases the management overhead. It's like a project: more resources can help get the job done faster...if they're properly co-ordinated, communicating properly, and everyone isn't waiting for one particular resource to finish it's task before the others can proceed. All of this takes significant overhead time IRL, I can't imagine it would be much different for flocks of cores...
I can see this allowing more simultaneous processes to run without bumping into one another, but basic speed for each process might go way, way down.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
The phone would be smart enough to not just be a computer but it could be my computer.
As trends continue it will not be "my computer" it'll remain my service provider's computer which they graciously let me use a small fraction of its capabilities for a monthly fee.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
While on the surface it may seem that "Big Brother" (or the competition, or China - assuming that they're not one and the same) is less likely to have his nose in your PC given that the intent of a phone is to maintain external communications links, one would do well to remember that those teeny commo chips that fit onto a phone's dinky mobo would fit onto a massive PC mobo, too. Which is something that has probably occurred to anybody who remembers the Tandy 1000 TX - and so remembers anonymous custom chips.
Which brings me to my point: It is a lot easier to build a Faraday cage for a phone-sized device to make sure that it truly is firewalled off...so a phone-sized PC with true computational power - assuming sufficient storage (and, ideally, a means of accessing external dumb storage) - is progress.
(Yeah, I know: Paranoia, extraordinaire. lollll...but if you'd had the jobs I've had...)
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Adapteva looks quite ready now.
Yes. IMHO it's much better than Ace of Spades.
Being able to carry your entire computer in your pocket and use it all day long is great, until you lose it lol. Unless of course this whole cloud thing actually catches on and carriers stop raping consumers on data prices.
I'm still waiting for the 80-core PC.
How about realizing one of your predictions before creating another. You never achieved an 80-core PC and barely made a dent into the mobile CPU market so don't bother predicting anything for the mobile market until you are player.
Also Intel, its time to change your architecture. Packing in billions of transistors into a core to support legacy instructions is not an efficient design anymore. I don't want 4, 48 or 80 cores with defunct MMX and obsolete x86 instructions. Stop making CPU's where every core contains the entire history of Intel.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
My money is on linux/android
Intel like to throw claims like this out there to try and win mind-share.
It means nothing, but sounds impressive in a vague, buzz-wordy way. It's just marketing.
I'm not surprised their vague future predictions are aimed at mobile now. They desperately need mind-share in that segment.
"Look! We're relavent in mobile! We'll have FORTY-EIGHT cores! All with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!"
FUNK!
Currently your PC is a rather dumb tool, a useful tool but dumb. The fantasy is that stuff like Siri makes computers actually useful other then for finding cat pictures. Because outside work related coding and some gaming, I don't use my PC for much that other devices couldn't also do. Yes, I watch movies on it but I can watch movies on a projector if they still sell them. I can play music on a wax cylinder.
Yes, there are some small advantages but not nearly as many as you would like.
Play romantic music computer... no not the safety dance... yes dancing is romantic but not the safety dance.
Really, try to get a computer to do something as simple as understand mood and play the right music. That is what a MY computer could do, I think. Be more then a tool but an actual help. Not just enable me to with effort get things done (make manual playlist with the right mood music, then select play music when I am in the mood) but actually do stuff for me.
But I don't see how more cores could help. Big Blue got cores coming out its nose and it can't make a playlist based on my mood anymore then a C64 could.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Haha, had a genuine laugh at this. :D Was just going to make a similar reference.
--- Amateur musician: http://josh.morine.net/headbanger/
I'm pretty sure that if you told someone 10 years ago we'd have quad core processors running at over 1GHz with loads of graphics, ram, etc on a smart mobile phone, they'd think why can't you use it as your main computer? In 5-10 years by the time this 48 core would be feasible, desktop computing will have grown/changed as well. I'm not sure our mobile devices will ever be our main computers. A link to them perhaps, but its far easier to offload the work to a remote station than do it all onboard.
The issue they're trying to solve isn't "how do we make more powerful phones?", it's "how can we lower power usage without sacrificing power?".
If you try to improve performance the same way desktops did (higher clocks, great gobs of cache, and more execution units inside the core), you'd raise performance, but you'd also massively increase your power draw without giving you an easy way to lower it when it's not in use. Underclocking only gets you so far - ideally, you'd need to be able to shut down execution units, or even some of your cache.
With this number of cores, you can shut down entire cores while you idle, which is much simpler to manage. Sitting in your pocket, this thing would only be running on a core or two.
I can see what Intel is thinking. It's a solid hardware idea, but it requires a massive shift in software that doesn't seem likely. Much like Itanium, in retrospect.
9 women can't have a baby in a month. All the data being processed by those 48 cores still has to pass through the same vagina to get to RAM or Flash.
Until each core in a multicore platform has its own private RAM interface, to its own private RAM, the point of diminishing returns will remain at some number of cores that is much smaller than 48.
Interesting choice of words.. I still don't know what I'm buying - but it won't be for another ten years.. that's for sure.
There are two issues with all this multi-core speak we've been hearing:
There is hardly any code, other than a few optimized libraries, that use multi core processors. They try to make it sound unimportant but it is the largest hurdle. There is a reason people don't think of a 3930k as being 50% faster than a 3820! Other than some failed libraries like OpenMP; there are no valid programming models to use either multithreading and/or networking transparantly (since it should not functionally make any difference). Ergo: The developers are still making their single-thread code.
The advantage of multi core processors can be that you can lower you clockspeeds and/or memory speeds on secondary tasks. Hardly any research is done on that (I have myself but let's call that an 'academic' proof of concept).
nosig today
Reminds me of an old Soviet Russia joke(more here):
A Polish tourist comes back home after visiting the USSR. He carries two very large and heavy suitcases. On his wrist is a new Soviet-made watch. He tells the customs man: "This is a new Soviet watch. It's a wonder unknown in the capitalist countries. You see, it shows time, the rate of your pulse beats, the phases of the Moon, the weather in Warsaw, Moscow, and New York, and more and more!"
"Yes, it's a wonder," the customs man agrees. "And what is it you have in these big suitcases?"
"Oh, it's just the batteries for that watch."
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
I always wondered why someone doesn't make a single chip using lots of cores that are along the lines of the early 8-bit processors. I mean, given the transistor count on modern chips, how many 8080/6502/1802 processors with their own memory could be put on a single chip? Okay, you'd need some sort of controller and so on - I'm sure even a 48-core (or 12 core) chip has some dedicated circuitry so the cores can communicate. It doesn't absolutely have to be 8-bit of course, but we did get work done on the old 8-bit machines. So, 1000 cores anyone?
Cellphones have dedicated video encode/decode hardware. If there is only one piece of hardware, they're only good at doing one at a time (although picture-in-picture never really took off on TV... I doubt it will be seen on cell phones.). When the codecs change, the hardware acceleration becomes useless too. The software decoder on my phone chews through battery compared to the hardware one, but the hardware decoder can't decode some video files.
With a name like yours, you would have had to.
Ya, with nanobattery life these things will have, people might actually go out and expirence the real world again, while their phone/tablet charges.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The assumption that one is sucking down more power with more cores is not correct. The point is to suck down less power. Using simplified cores allows larger chip processes to be used (no need to shrink things down to 20nm), and you run them at a far lower frequency, resulting in far less leakage (in two dimensions). Having many independent cores also allows the chip to run at a far lower frequency and to actually shut the power off on a core-by-core basis based on load. Not just stop the clocks... actually kill the power in the core's circuitry. It's actually an easier solution than trying to implement low-power modes or frequency shifting for unloaded subsystems. If the frequency can be brought down enough on a large-feature chip one doesn't even need to shut the power off, leakage will be low enough that one can simply gate the clock and achieve almost the same efficiency.
The power/performance tradeoff is definitely a win when you move to more, slower cores. That's been shown over and over again over the past decade with the opteron/xeon wars. The only potential lose occurs when you reduce the size of the on-chip caches since smaller caches will result in more power consumption accessing the dynamic ram. So tuning on-chip caches becomes very important. But that's about the only issue.
-Matt
Speaking of 5 years ago, we're still waiting for this to go commercial.
Once we had dumb terminals on our desks, and we connected to a mainframe in a floor of a building.
Then we moved to having all the power on our desks, got rid of the mainframes.
Now the mainframe will be in your pocket, and you will use a dumb terminal on any desk to interact with it!
Is that 48 cores in your pocket, or are you jsut happy to see me?
48-Core Chips Could Redefine Mobile Devices
Why? its a friggin phone. Do I really need 48 cores to get a phone call?
How about 48 cores in my workstation. Now there I could get some use out of 48 cores.
Oh boy, Oh boy, Oh boy, 48-cores in a phone! It is a National Security nightmare, who needs a portable Cray?! Plug n Pray USB with a power/data/array port and woohoo, spatial physics is no longer in the the realm of data centers.
:P
"Enric Herrero, a research scientist at Intel Labs in Barcelona, explained that with the prototype chip someone could, for instance, be encrypting an email while also working on other power-intensive apps at the same time — without hiccups."
Encrypt an email? Ah, so that is what a "smartphone" is supposed to be doing. "Without hiccups," guy must be new at Intel - Have you seen the OS being used on phones right now? Go back to basics and speeds increase without all the GUI crap - why isn't that being made on the fly?
Everyone is being so upbeat and optimistic, you got 50 days left.
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products
Having a thread move between cores is less efficient that keeping it on one core, so if I am running a single-threaded program I would expect to see one core busy and the other cores mostly idle.