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...
And we can stop then because, well, you know, 640 cores should be enough for anyone.
Keep floggin' that dead Larrabee horse, Intel.
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?
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.
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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
Not useful without a serious change in computer architecture.
Amdahl's law. It's a bitch, baby.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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.
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