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Intel Supercharges Atom Chips With 16 Cores and Pro Level Features (pcworld.com)
Agam Shah, writing for PCWorld: Intel's Atom was mostly known as a low-end chip for mobile devices that underperformed. That may not be the case anymore. The latest Atom C3000 chips announced on Tuesday have up to 16 cores and are more sophisticated than ever. The chips are made for storage arrays, networking equipment, and internet of things devices. The new chips have features found mostly in server chips, including networking, virtualization, and error correction features. [...] A surprising feature in C3000 is RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) capabilities, which is mostly found on high-end Xeon chips. The feature corrects data errors on the fly and prevents networking and storage equipment from crashing.
These chips are designed for very parallelizable applications like file serving, managing multiple simultaneous VPN clients, etc. You want one core per NIC for these to make the best use of AESNI plus one or two more for management tasks.
Going from 16 to 4 would be a light version of the chip, and everyone knows that Cores Light is garbage.
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They'd like a spot at the table of the massive amount of chips that will be needed in autonomous cars and other AI driven machines. Parrelization works very well in processing data from lots of sensors. I suspect this is just the beginning.
Most people can't wrap their brains around more than two
Fortunately this is not a chip for most people, and boy are most people going to get upset if they look at their GPU.
, and most applications don't lend themselves to massive parallelization.
Actually a lot of the most computationally intensive tasks are embarrassingly parallel. But even if they aren't, who said we need to run one application per physical CPU? What version of DOS are you still running that doesn't allow multi-tasking?
"You want one core per NIC for these to make the best use of AESNI plus one or two more for management tasks."
One Core per NIC? Given the drastically reduced connectivity in the C3000 versus even desktop Pentium line processors in the form of fewer PCI-E lanes, good luck getting one PCI-E lane per NIC, let alone one core per.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I would be happy with a mini rack/blade system about the size of a HP MicroServer, with the ability to add 4-8 of these CPU boards in it as blades, each board having a SSD big enough to load a Linux distro or ESXi... and one has a nice CPU farm that doesn't take much space, but can run a lot of lightweight VMs very economically.
You want one core per NIC for these to make the best use of AESNI plus one or two more for management tasks.
While we're talking about massive parallelity, I want Knights with NI.
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