Intel Terascale Brings 80 Cores To Your Desktop ~

HardOCP ^ | Wednesday September 27, 2006 | Steve

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Intel Terascale Brings 80 Cores To Your Desktop

If you were impressed with dual core technology and quad core processors seem a bit like overkill, how about Terascale processing with 80 cores? Sound far fetched? Intel doesn’t think so. Head on over to PCPerspective for the rest of the article.

For our discussions here, the term “terascale” will refer to a processor with 32 or more cores. Moving away from the “large” cores seen in the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 lines from Intel and AMD, the cores in a terascale processor will be much simpler (kind of like we are seeing in the Cell processor design). These cores will be low power and probably based on a past-generation Intel architecture that has been refined and perfected.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From the linked article:

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But, Moore’s Law still applies, and by 2011 Intel estimates we’ll be seeing chips with over 32 billion transistors on them! But if we can’t increase the power of a single core and cranking up the frequency, what can we do with all those transistor resources? The answer: more cores. Many more.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

IBM Cell was the first...

[ShadowAce]

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Related item:

JOHN DVORAK'S SECOND OPINION
Eighty cores and nothing to do, yet
Commentary: But next generation chips could lead to real-time translation

**********************AN EXCERPT *********************************

y John C. Dvorak

Last Update: 1:46 PM ET Sep 27, 2006

BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- During this week's Intel Developer's conference, the company's CEO told of a bold plan to produce and ship an "80 core" CPU by the year 2011.

Since this multiple core concept has just begun to hit the street one can only imagine how the software developers will exploit these chips.

Ah, yes, I'm guessing that only a few people are aware that whether a chip has two cores or four cores or 80 cores only one core can actually be used with most of today's software.

When we talk about multiple cores we are essentially talking about multiple CPU's that just so happen to be within the same chip. It's the software that coordinates and manages the chores on the chip and somehow has to coordinate multiple cores doing multiple things.

Currently Adobe Photoshop and a few advanced games are among the few products that can mange this chore. It's hoped that someday the computer's operating system itself can do all the heavy lifting.

But I can assure you that we'll have 80 cores long before the operating system software will ever be able to actually use all this power. The lag between software and hardware gets worse and worse.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

More:

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Each time there is a breakthrough like this someone comes up with an application that adds to the capability and usefulness of these machines. The last big application of this sort, I would suggest, is the World Wide Web and you must admit that that was a whopper in terms of societal and worldwide impact.

What do I hope to eventually see? Well if you've ever watched Star Trek, you've probably noticed how everyone speaks English -- Klingons, Romulans, even Scotty. It's their universal voice translation computers that made it possible. Personally I think multiple cores will eventually lead to something like that. After all, it is within the realm of eventual possibility.

You speak in one language; the exact and audible translation comes out in another language. There is your killer application for multi-core.

Think of the potential. Think of the shopping!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks ....just added Dvorak's comments......

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Battlefield translations???

[antiRepublicrat]

Currently Adobe Photoshop and a few advanced games are among the few products that can mange this chore.

Not to mention if you're simply running multiple programs at the same time, or multiple active services in the background.

[djf]

You will never be able to use all the power.

The problem with multi-CP type technologies is nothing new. IBM worked on it for years with their multi-processors.

There are certain functions in the machine that HAVE to occur single-threaded. Like storage acquisition. IBM's solution was to design a hierarchy of locks into the OS. To do certain functions, you have to have gotten the lock to do it.

So they soon discovered that after four CPU's or so, the new cpus online ended up spending so much time competing for the locks that the percentage of processor time they actually spent doing usefull work almost went to single digits.

Big Blue has recently redesigned some of the lock stuff, and replaced some of it with hardware, and now supports complexes up 32 CP's, IIRC.

But the problem will never go away. Every processor you add spends more time waiting. You get to a point of diminishing returns where you spend more time trying to manage what the processor is doing than doing any true, usefull work with it.

[martin_fierro]

Cor!

[Marine_Uncle]

"Battlefield translations???"
Things are getting a bit out of hand. heheh. Surely what they project will come to be, by all indications. In the arena of silicon wafer technology I cannot help but wonder just where the limit in size of a MOS channel length will finally be shown to be the smallest sub micron area the quantum models will support.
Just in the area of extremly powerfull signal processors for instance, I can imagine systems that currently may be on the table might eventually be produced to literally make the current devices look like a vacume tube triode in comparision for speed and capacity to process information at speeds not yet available for banks of data inconceivable just a few years back. This stuff is really getting wild.
Meanwhile the march goes on for ever larger RAMS and other storage devices to compliment the main system logic. Wild just wild.

[zeugma]

Not to mention if you're simply running multiple programs at the same time, or multiple active services in the background.

How about this... Imagine VMware on an 80-core box.

Toss in video processing, Celestia, some Freeper Protien Folding, and you have the makings of some real computational fun.

[rit]

Speaking of IBM...money.cnn.com news flash:

IBM is recalling 526,000 laptop batteries made by Sony Corp. due to possible fire hazard. Full story soon.

[djf]

I think the common thread though all the laptop battery recall stories is Sony.

[rit]

I have an HP pavilion laptop. Still waiting to see if they recall their batteries. They should have marketed it with the slogan "You'll warm up to our laptop in no time."

The battery lasts for just over an hour. It gets really warm, which I guess is OK if you are, say, in the artic.