Posted on 04/09/2010 10:29:31 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Intel will ship computers with an experimental 48-core processor to researchers by the end of the second quarter as the company tries to reshape its future chips.
Limited quantities of the processor will be sent primarily to academic institutions, said Sean Koehl, technology evangelist with Intel Labs, during an event in New York on Wednesday. The chip may not become commercially available as it is part of a research project, but features from the processor could be implemented in future chips.
Development of the processor is part of Intel's terascale computing research program. A focus area of the program is to put more cores in a single processor to enable faster computing in devices ranging from mobiles to servers.
The 48-core chip operates at about the clock speed of Atom-based chips, said Christopher Anderson, an engineer with Intel Labs. Intel's latest Atom chips are power-efficient, are targeted at netbooks and small desktops, and run at clock speeds between 1.66GHz and 1.83GHz. The 48-core processor, built on a mesh architecture, could lead to a massive performance boost when all the chips communicate with each other, Anderson said.
Adding cores to processors is considered a power-efficient way of boosting chip performance. The traditional way of boosting performance was by cranking up CPU clock speed, but that led to excessive heat dissipation and power consumption.
Intel and its rival Advanced Micro Devices last week announced new server chips with their highest core counts to date. Intel announced Xeon 7500 and 6500 processors for high-end servers, which included eight-core chips, while AMD announced Opteron 6100 chips with 12 cores.
The 48-core processor's architecture includes improvements that cut memory and communication bottlenecks that affect current x86 chips. For faster data exchange, the chip topology organizes the cores with multiple points to receive and transfer data.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
Awww, big deal.
I will get excited when Intel ships the 50 bazillion gazillion core processors that President For Life Barrak Hussein Odumbo requires them to ship, with one of his executive orders.
And they better be prepared to prove they lose money on every one.
Larrabee redirected towards the CPU market?
Anderson and Intel are just blowing smoke here. Been in embedded computing for many years, and have designed dual-core CPUs on FPGAs myself. I can tell you that software algorithms for spreading general-purpose tasks among 48 cores DOES NOT EXIST. You can divide up easily partitionable tasks, such as shading or rendering, but general-purpose computing tasks? No.
Hmm. I guess I ought to quit my job then, since I install and configure general-purpose clusters that range from 16 cores to several hundred.
Think I should tell the users that their software doesn't actually work?
How many microseconds faster will that make my Word files when I page up and down?
I bet that as more people learn how to do data parallel coding (like you do with CUDA, Stream, OpenCL, or DirectCompute with upwards of 2000 processor streams) the relaxed parallelism of 48 or more cores that are not required to be run in data parallel mode will be put to good use.
zero. Word is a single-threaded application and would only use one of the 48 cores.
Oh, noez, don't do that. It's like Wiley Coyote in the RoadRunner cartoons -- he can keep running through thin air, as long as he doesn't look down.
May not do much for Word files but when I am converting full HD video from MPEG2 to MPEG4, I could use all the help I can get.
On my last dual core computer some files took days. On my new quad core computer they take hours. I would love to fire up a project, get a cup of coffee and be done.
Without AMD’s Hypertransport technology Intel has to rely on software solutions to network cores. Gluing cores together is just not the same as daisy-chaining.
LOL!
Word actually does all that spell checking stuff on a separate thread, so it should work better on a dual core machine.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.