Comments on: Intel pledges 80 cores in five years
CEO Paul Otellini reveals plans at IDF to ship a "teraflop" processor around the end of decade with 80 cores.
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technology, but because someone does. If this was not true, I
doubt that billions upon billions of dollars would be spent
working on it.
Complex calculations for scientific research, video production,
or even computer games need the horsepower and the
technology trickles down to you and me whether we need it or
not. No one will force you to buy another computer, but you may
not even be able to run your OS as it continues to evolve and
expand over time.
Have a nice day!
People wondered why I bought a 386/33 system with 16mb of ram once back in the day when 2-4mb was considered good.
And just for the wags jumping on MS, I noted a while back that current versions of Linux really, really stink when run on older systems too. It's not just MS making things that require more and faster hardware.
However, I do think that before we get to 80 core systems we'll find a point where people don't feel a need to upgrade any more but who knows, I don't.
and intel are just preparing themselves for the high demand!
Fascinating.
I can't wait to see the first super computer built using these chips. :)
I will LOVE 80 cores!
Why on earth would Dell, Lenovo, IBM, and HP escape to AMD if their technology or roadmap were busted.
I figure if you cannot address the issues then just pull out a laser beam or an 80 core CPU. Bravo Intel.
Intels stock is up AMD's is down right now.
IBM, Dell and HP went with AMD finally for three reasons. In this order they had a, at the time, a better product, as good or better pricing and they wanted the PR of going with the underdog....to make fangirls like you happy.
Intel has let go of alot of fat, sold off non profitable groups and now has a better product, speed, power and heat wise.
Lets see what happens in a year. It is going to all come down to a price war...which can win if they want to.
You can't even compare each core of the Cell to an existing Intel X86 chip on the market today. The Cell cores each do more work, and include more functionality than what is included in the X86 class chips. So the Cell isn't perfect for any one job, but it meets the needs of many hundreds of jobs in one chip design. This significantly reduces development costs for those companies using the Cell processor in their hardware.
The 80 core Intel demonstration chip is an entirely different effort all-together and is still 5 years from production.
Regarding cores & efficiency, sure, getting more cores to add speed efficiently by co-operating is hard. To do efficiently, that is. You get diminishing returns by adding cores without being clever. That still doesn't discount the brute force approach! Throw 1000s of cores at it, it will be faster even if half of them are slacking or crashed/looping half the time.
2) with power savings comes thermal management.
3) reliability. If 1 or more cores fail, just ignore them. You only lose 1.25% of your performance per core. If you can "map out" bad cores (similar to how you would shut them down for power & heat savings) you could loose 5-10 cores before you even noticed the performance hit.
4) for things like laptops, you could dynamically redistrubute core loading to avoid local hot spots and run with less overall cooling.
5) certain operations (rendering, raytracing, FEA, CFD) would benefit hugely from multiple small cores over 1-4 monolithic cores.
sad that they don't have to make nails one at a time any more?
Progress marches on.
Have a nice day!
C|Net has focused on the memory per core as the big issue. They are right to be impressed by it, but they fail to see the big picture as to why this memory is there. Each core is expected to perform dozens, hundreds or thousands of operations on that set of data. Some of these operations may be to make that data available to instructions being performed by another core. Splitting the data is part of the design change and software will need to know where it sends data in a multi-core chip and where it's instructions are being run to optimize data access.
Some people complain that 20GB of RAM might not be enough. They say that the system will allow more RAM because that makes sense. No it won't! You will not want to pool all of your system RAM into one place accessed by any of these 80 cores. It is a performance hit to multi-core systems to share that RAM. Some of this will be seen with one CPU performing an operation on data held by RAM attached to another CPU. In this case only two CPUs are held up instead of all 80. Loading data from outside the CPU to have a core perform operations on will slow this system down in the same way that a page file hit slows a current Windows system. It's the difference in 2 vs. 80 operations.
Software that runs on Tera-Scale processors would know how to split tasks and memory between cores. The Operating System will need to understand to give a set of cores to an application so it has enough RAM and processing power to get it's jobs done. You could see 20 cores doing the same operation on sets of data (SIMD). Then at the same time 10 cores doing a different set of instructions on a shared set of data. Each core can reach the RAM on another core, so those 10 would be able to read, write, and perform an operation on that RAM.
This chip combines some SIMD concepts along with parallel computing concepts and the new multi-core concepts. Intel discovered you really need a lot of RAM per core so each core can handle a lot of data by itself and the entire RAM needs of the applications will be met within the CPU. 20GB is what they show in a sample using SRAM. They will be switching to DRAM and with that switch may also increase the RAM per core. The key to RAM per Core is going to depend on some efficiencies in the CPU based on tasks and data. Intel will begin to discover their performance curve with this prototype.
This system is nothing near what you will see on your desk in 5 years. It will be used to pave the way for application development and system design for years to come. It is the most important stepping stone for the future of computing that we've seen in the last several years because it changes how the hardware and software are designed to work together.
user requests via hardware load-balancer, a cluster of 12-cpu DB
machines, and one DB machine with 48 cpus (w/96 GB). Managing
that many machines is a hassle (and that's small compared with
Google, from what I hear). If we could divide by 80 it would be
great. The one downside being that you do have a lot of eggs in
each basket -- one machine down cuts out a lot of capacity.
A 3.33 GHz Core 2 CPU comsumes about 75-80 W but can reach over 130W when put under heavy load. The 80 core chip is supposed to operate at 3.19 Gz.
So lets say that each core consumes 37.5 W at 3.2 GHz. Intel has also annuonced a new 35nm technology that will yield a 310% increase in performance per watt. So dividing 37.5 by 3.1 will yield what a core based an that enhanced technology will consume: 12.5W. If we multiply that by 80 which is the amount of cores on the chip we will get a power consumption of about 1000W. And that is not enough, they are also going to sandwich stacked SRAM with a performance of Terabytes/second attached directly to the bottom of the chip which also consumes a tremendous amount of power. I would like to see an answer on how they are going to deal with all this heat of over 1000W coming from that little chip before I'll take this statement seriously. We're talking about heat that is comparable to the face of the sun!
The reason of my doubt is the power compsumption of the new 80 core chip.
A 3.33 GHz Core 2 CPU comsumes about 75-80 W but can reach over 130W when put under heavy load. The 80 core chip is supposed to operate at 3.19 GHz.
So lets say that each core consumes 37.5 W at 3.2 GHz. Intel has also annuonced a new 35nm technology that will yield a 310% increase in performance per watt. So dividing 37.5 by 3.1 will yield what a core based an that enhanced technology will consume: 12.5W. If we multiply that by 80 which is the amount of cores on the chip we will get a power consumption of about 1000W. And that is not enough, they are also going to sandwich stacked SRAM with a performance of Terabytes/second attached directly to the bottom of the chip which also consumes a tremendous amount of power. I would like to see an answer on how they are going to deal with all this heat of over 1000W coming from that little chip before I'll take their statements about this chip seriously. We're talking about heat that is comparable to the face of the sun!
Umm, have you seen the Ultra High Definition media that the japanese will be using for TV by 2015? That stuff makes 35mm film look fuzzy. And that runs to rather supercomputing type terascale storage and processing requirements.
Somebody will have to make those programs, and also design those much more detailed sets, costumes and doubtless CGI special effects.
Yes bring on my petaflops of processing, and Ultra High Def manga streaming to my OLED wall. Bring that right along over here.
You can Keep your Win 98, MS Word, and BBC basic for your grey little tank top world thankyou.
The iphone already has the capacity to be the library of alexandria in your pocket.
You see where this is going? MS Word up yo yo.
- by Inurdaes March 14, 2009 3:47 AM PDT
- I can has suparcomputar nao? :D
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