Intel to Ship Experimental Chips With 48 Cores

[Gandalf]

[citation][nom]MrHectorEric[/nom]I'm not sure I even have enough programs to be able to utilize half of it.[/citation]
I'm running World Community Grid jobs on my i7. I'd love to be able to stick this processor into my system. I'd be able to run 96 jobs at one time rather than just 8. Now that's what I'd call real magic.

 

[reddragon72]

This processor is not anything close to the current desktop/laptop CPU's. It is a completely different design all together. Current CPU's, I7, core2 series, have a much more complex core with both an Integer and FPU. This new process does both in one core, but each care can only handle a portion of the code and thus the program is split up and processed by many cores at once. Windows and most Linux OS's cannot run on this CPU, but there are two "Linux" based OS's that can run on it. Basically you cannot compare this new CPU with the current offerings, since they both processes code in two very different ways.

 

[hemelskonijn]

[citation][nom]palladin9479[/nom]All the people thinking gaming or other typical computer tasks need to stop. This thing is not x86 (x64), that should be obvious in its clock speed and design. Its a RISC cpu specifically designed for huge parallel operation, an older CPU would slaughter this in any gaming.No this baby is designed for something much bigger. AI, scientific research, doing 3D PIC simulations of a nuclear reaction (currently nothing we have is capable of doing that in less then a day or three). You take a bunch of these and connect them all together in a Unix style OS, then custom design programs for them that run batch processing jobs. Feed it data and let it work its magic.[/citation]

There is no way of knowing whether any x86 CPU slaughters this thing when it comes to gaming.
The only thing you can know for sure is that games compiled for an x86 cpu will never run good enough on any RISC CPU.
But keep in mind that all 3 popular game consoles run on RISC thus making it plausible that if one recompiled a game for this CPU it would kick any x86's arse now imagine the game being build to take full advantage of this super CPU.

There is no rule against gaming on RISC .

 

[Guest]

Probably only useful for @home clients, search engines/web servers, or a terminal with many clients (like eg a company where each employer has his own keyboard/mouse and LCD, but uses shared CPU/RAM/Printers or so....

 

[JOSHSKORN]

I want a computer that can play 5 games at once! lol So I don't have to sit there and load everything. Will this do it? ...with Crysis & Crysis 2 and 3 other games?? lol

 

[builderbobftw]

No, It can't play Crysis since Crysis used only 2 cores effectuivley.

 

[descendency]

But can it...

... check email?

Honestly, this is only good for huge render farms right now with massively parallel tasks to be completed.

 

[aneasytarget]

But can I check email, run anti-virus, AND edit digital photos...at the same time?
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/quad-core-multitasking-4-core-phenom-core-5,10073.html

 

[kingssman]

Eventually we'll be doing a # cores vs Clockrate to see the improvements in each when it comes to computing power.

 

[supere989]

I wonder if CUDA will execute on this? Seeing as how there seem to be similarities in the structure of GPU Streaming Processors?

 

[builderbobftw]

But can it play Hello Kitty Island Adventure?

 

[eemaker]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_cXi7uyJU4

A few highlights from what I could transcribe

SCC Single-Chip Cloud Computer.
Communication Network is packet based - router interconnect?
Parallel software research
Cluster of compute nodes
Each a small IA core – optimized
Memory Controller Digital portion
On Die Mesh Network
With development board to supply easy access to various signals
Created a Linux operating system based on a full featured standard Linux kernel where they supplied the necessary changes for this experimental platform

Q.
How do the separate operating systems run? Completely independently? Can we communicate easily and effectively? Can we have shared memory in a separate nodes memory? What is the memory architecture? On the developement board, What is the memory that looks like RAM for?

A.
http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1421.htm

I personally find the projects at the end of the video uninteresting... but I'm curious what other universities/institutions are planning.

@reddragon72 ...?

 

[eemaker]

Inside the Single-chip Cloud Computer

The name “Single-chip Cloud Computer” reflects the fact that the architecture resembles a scalable cluster of computers such as you would find in a cloud, integrated into silicon.
The research chip features:
24 “tiles” with two IA cores per tile
A 24-router mesh network with 256 GB/s bisection bandwidth
4 integrated DDR3 memory controllers
Hardware support for message-passing



In a sense, the SCC is a microcosm of cloud datacenter. Each core can run a separate OS and software stack and act like an individual compute node that communicates with other compute nodes over a packet-based network.
One of the most important aspects of the SCC's network fabric architecture is that it supports "scale-out" message-passing programming models that have been proven to scale to 1000s of processors in cloud datacenters. Though each core has 2 levels of cache, there is no hardware cache coherence support among cores in order to simplify the design, reduce power consumption and to encourage the exploration of datacenter distributed memory software models, on-chip. Intel researchers have successfully demonstrated message-passing as well as software-based coherent shared memory on the SCC.
Fine-grained power management is a focus of the chip as well. Software applications are given control to turn cores on and off or to change their performance levels, continuously adapting to use the minimum energy needed at a given moment. The SCC can run all 48 cores at one time over a range of 25W to 125W and selectively vary the voltage and frequency of the mesh network as well as sets of cores. Each tile (2 cores) can have its own frequency, and groupings of four tiles (8 cores) can each run at their own voltage.

http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1826.htm

 

[kelemvor4]

I want a tablet pc with one.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

It's strictly for commercial applications but it sure is fun thinking about having your very personal super computer.

 

[daworstplaya]

Where's my 20Ghz single core 64bit CPU damn it?!? LOL