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Intel's Knights Landing — 72 Cores, 3 Teraflops
New submitter asliarun writes "David Kanter of Realworldtech recently posted his take on Intel's upcoming Knights Landing chip. The technical specs are massive, showing Intel's new-found focus on throughput processing (and possibly graphics). 72 Silvermont cores with beefy FP and vector units, mesh fabric with tile based architecture, DDR4 support with a 384-bit memory controller, QPI connectivity instead of PCIe, and 16GB on-package eDRAM (yes, 16GB). All this should ensure throughput of 3 teraflop/s double precision. Many of the architectural elements would also be the same as Intel's future CPU chips — so this is also a peek into Intel's vision of the future. Will Intel use this as a platform to compete with nVidia and AMD/ATI on graphics? Or will this be another Larrabee? Or just an exotic HPC product like Knights Corner?"
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
I wonder how nice these will be to program. The "just recompile and run" promise for Knights Corner was little more than a cruel joke: to get any serious performance out of the current generation of MICs you have to wrestle with vector intrinsics and that stupid in-order architecture. At least the latter will apparently be dropped in Knights Landing.
For what it's worth: I'll be looking forward to NVIDIA's Maxwell. At least CUDA got the vectorization problem sorted out. And no: not even the Intel compiler handles vectorization well.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Yes, it's too hard. The future is in concurrency. The actor model will probably take off since it's easy to pick up and use.
Multicore implies more speed only if your process is parallelized. Not all interactive processes on a single-user computer can be, wrote Amdahl.
Because you can never have too many cores that you aren't using most of the time.
How about more speed? Or is that too hard?
Pretty sure it wasn't meant for you (or me).
However, for servers, including hypervisors, it would be very interesting. There are lots of client/server products that scale better with more cores.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
"eDRAM" in this article is almost certainly an error for that reason.
eDRAM isn't very well defined, but it basically boils down to "DRAM manufactured on a modified logic process," allowing it to be placed on-die alongside logic, or at the very least built using the same tools if you're a logic house (Intel, TSMC, etc). This is as opposed to traditional DRAM, which is made on dedicated processes that is optimized for space (capacitors) and follows its own development cadence.
The article notes that this is on-package as opposed to on-die memory, which under most circumstances would mean regular DRAM would work just fine. The biggest example of on-package RAM would be SoCs, where the DRAM is regularly placed in the same package for size/convenience and then wire-bonded to the processor die (although alternative connections do exist). Conversely eDRAM is almost exclusively used on-die with logic - this being its designed use - chiefly as a higher density/lower performance alternative to SRAM. You can do off-die eDRAM, which is what Intel does for Crystalwell, but that's almost entirely down to Intel using spare fab capacity and keeping production in house (they don't make DRAM) as opposed to technical requirements. Which is why you don't see off-die eDRAM regularly used.
Or to put it bluntly, just because DRAM is on-package doesn't mean it's eDRAM. There are further qualifications to making it eDRAM than moving the DRAM die closer to the CPU.
But ultimately as you note cost would be an issue. Even taking into account process advantages between now and the Knight's Landing launch, 16GB of eDRAM would be huge. Mind bogglingly huge. Many thousands of square millimeters huge. Based on space constraints alone it can't be eDRAM; it has to be DRAM to make that aspect work, and even then 16GB of DRAM wouldn't be small.
This is another one of those IBM things made from the most rare element in the universe: unobtainium. You can't get it here. You can't get it there either. At one point I would have argued otherwise, but no. Cuda cores I can get. This crap I can't get. Its just like the Cell Broadband engine. Remember that? If you bought a PS3, then it had a (slightly crippled) one of those in it. Except that it had no branch prediction. And one of the main cores was disabled. And you couldn't do anything with the integrated graphics. And if you wanted to actually use the co-processor functions, you had to re-write your applications. And you needed to let IBM drill into your teeth and then do a rectal probe before you could get any of the software to make it work. And it only had 256MB of ram. And you couldn't upgrade or expand that. With IBM's new wonder, we get the promise of 72 cores. If you have a dual-xeon processor. And give IBM a million dollars. And you sign a bunch of papers letting them hook up the high voltage rectal probes. Or you could buy a Kepler NVIDIA card which you can install into the system you already own, and it costs about the same as a half-decent monitor. And NVIDIA's software is publicly downloadable. So is this useful to me or 99.999% of the people on /.? No. Its news for nerds, but only four guys can afford it: Bill G., Mark Z., Larry P. and Sergey B..
You saw a speed-up because video and 3D are in a class of problems that are very easy to parallelize. So is decompressing all the images in an HTML document. Laying out the document, on the other hand, isn't so easy to parallelize, if only because every floating box theoretically affects all the boxes that follow it.
OK, we have yet another mesh of processors, an idea that comes back again and again. The details of how processors communicate really matter. Is this is a totally non-shared-memory machine? Is there some shared memory, but it's slow? If there's shared memory, what are the cache consistency rules?
Historically, meshes of processors without shared memory have been painful to program. There's a long line of machines, from the nCube to the Cell, where the hardware worked but the thing was too much of a pain to program. Most designs have suffered from having too little local memory per CPU. If there's enough memory per CPU to, well, run at least a minimal OS and some jobs, then the mesh can be treated as a cluster of intercommunicating peers. That's something for which useful software exists. If all the CPUs have to be treated as slaves of a control machine, then you need all-new software architectures to handle them. This usually results in one-off software that never becomes mature.
Basic truth: we only have three successful multiprocessor architectures that are general purpose - shared-memory multiprocessors, clusters, and GPUs. Everything other than that has been almost useless except for very specialized problems fitted to the hardware. Yet this problem needs to be cracked - single CPUs are not getting much faster.
I think you'd be surprised how many real world day to day task can be and are parallelized: [...] searching
I thought searching a large collection of documents was disk-bound, and traversing an index was an inherently serial process. Or what parallel data structure for searching did I miss?
rendering web pages
I don't see how rendering a web page can be fully parallelized. Decoding images, yes. Compositing, yes. Parsing and reflow, no. The size of one box affects every box below it, especially when float: is involved. And JavaScript is still single-threaded unless a script is 1. being displayed from a web server (Chrome doesn't support Web Workers in file:// for security reasons), 2. being displayed on a browser other than IE on XP, IE on Vista, and Android Browser <= 4.3 (which don't support Web Workers at all), and 3. not accessing the DOM.
compiling
True, each translation unit can be combined in parallel if you choose not to enable whole-program optimization. But I don't see how whole-program optimization can be done in parallel.
Because you can never have too many cores that you aren't using most of the time.
Install McAfee Antivírus, and problem solved: no more unused cores.
morcego
It may not be eDRAM, but I'm not sure what else Intel would easily package with the chip. We know the 128 MB of eDRAM on 22 nm is ~80 mm^2 of silicon, currently Intel is selling ~100 mm^2 of N-1 node silicon for ~$10 or less (See all the ultra cheap 32 nm clover trail+ tablets where they're winning sockets against allwinner, rockchip, etc., indicating that they must be selling them for equivalent or better prices than these companies.) By the time this product comes out 22 nm will be the N-1 node. In addition, a dedicated eDRAM chip is probably cheaper than a typical SoC/logic chip due to the smaller number of metal levels that are needed. Assuming N-1 node prices hold for a given area of silicon, 16 GB will need 12000 mm^2 of silicon (likely less as the current 128 MB die likely uses a not insignificant area for readout circuitry and PHY interface), coming out to around $1200. Add an extra $1000 for your actual processor and you have the current price of a low end Xeon Phi.
BitCoin has ASIC miners with ~10X the mining power per watt than most programmable alternatives such as GPGPU and FPGA. Anything less efficient than that is or soon will become cost-prohibitive to run.
The newer Bitcoin alternatives use memory-bound algorithms to prevent such a steep mining power escalation since memory capacity and bandwidth scale much more slowly than processing power but much more quickly on costs: with Bitcoin, increasing throughput by 10X simply required 10X the processing power but with the memory-bound alternatives, you also need 10X the RAM and 10X the memory bandwidth.
They tested this for the next ipad. While apple felt the 5 second battery life was too short to be practical, the beta testers were more concerned about the apple shaped 3rd degree burns imprinted on their thighs and palms
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Where are you getting Atom cores from?
From this Extremetech article, which has a slide speaking of the Knights Landing processor architecture having "up to 72 Intel Architecture cores based on Silvermont (Intel(R) Atom processor)"?
You're both correct. The original Atom cpu was built separately and started before the i7 arch. The new Silvermont "Atom" is based a lot of the i7 arch. It is a huge upgrade to the Atom line. It's like the original i7 fine tuned for power and running on 22nm. Very strong OoO pipeline design. The low power usage is great for a many core design because efficiently is more important than single-threaded performance.