Comments on: Intel readies massive multicore processors

Researchers work to mask intricate functionality of up-to-80-core chips, so hardware and software makers can more easily adapt to them.

[benjiernmd]

WOW!

Did they say it is RISC or CISC? LOL. When can I have it in my Mac
Pro towers and blades?

[ambigous]

teraflop

Their performance target is a teraflop? Count me as impressed!

[benjiernmd]

Military or meteorological use only.

Also for other scientific endeavours, like gene mapping. But for
home use? This is overkill.

[nuckelhedd]

How Now Brown Cow?

Overkill is what we want. Wouldn't it be nice to move as fast as those who lie to us. It would be nice to run our own climate models and such. Global warming my ass. More c02 means faster plant growth. I don't see that happening. Stretch out that Heating and Cooling timeline and you see the c02 timeline falls 800 years after the warming when the world was actually cooling. HMMMMM

[SooperGenius]

There are more things in heaven and earth

than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet to Horatio.

Sure Office (today) doesn't need 16 cores, how about video editing, compression, and transcoding, interactive photo editing, voice recognition, photo realistic rendering, synthetic vision (interesting home applications like photo-3D model, or home security)

Everytime the processing power rachets up, we find ways to use it. When it goes up by factors of 100, we find entirely new usage models (c.f. the overused "paradigm" word)

[woollyyams]

Yeah global warming is just a big conspiracy. i saw a documentary on it. Stupid lying Nobel Prize winners and other PhDs. I bet they are also responsible for hiding information about about aliens and stuff.

[nb2000nb]

You can never have too much speed. The only limiting factor is cost.

[akvish]

Good idea - creates more opportunities

Intel's multi-core idea is good as long it allows
one to partition core usage to be user defined. It
is not far-fetched to imagine uses of Supercomputing to come to normal day-to-day usage.
I see the requirement to pop-up within 3-5 years.

Intel's R&D has done the job but I don't expect
them to imagine the applications.

[rshimizu12]

TFLOP

It's rather ironic that Intel is crowing about 1 TFLOP when IBM already has 2 chips that are already capable of 1 TFLOP with far less cores. Both the cell and Power5 chip are cabaple of 1 TFLOP

[dmm]

supercomputing is more than teraflops

You also need:
huge amounts of memory
error correcting memory
memory access that can keep up with the CPU
really huge amounts of data storage (e.g., hard drive)
fast access to that data storage
operating system that can control all this
software that can make use of all this

[Disco-Mike]

When can I expect to see the laptop version ?

[ilya_cilk]

With the arrival of these CPUs, multicore programming will be a competitive imperative for software developers within 12-18 months.

Here's an e-Book on multicore programming. Covers programming approaches including OpenMP, Intel's TBB, Pthreads, Cilk++, MPI.

http://www.cilk.com/multicore-e-book

[ilya_cilk]

With the arrival of these CPUs, multicore programming will be a competitive imperative for software developers within 12-18 months.

Here's an e-Book on multicore programming. Covers programming approaches including OpenMP, Intel's TBB, Pthreads, Cilk++, MPI.

http://www.cilk.com/multicore-e-book