Intel's Knights Corner: 50+ Core 22nm Co-processor

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Camikazi

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[citation][nom]gmcizzle[/nom]Lol wow 50 cores. Guess that makes AMD's 16-core reveal another flop.[/citation]
It's a Co-Processor, an accelerator, not a main CPU they are not the same thing.
 

dragonsqrrl

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[citation][nom]gmcizzle[/nom]Lol wow 50 cores. Guess that makes AMD's 16-core reveal another flop.[/citation]
Not an absolute flop (it does provide a good price/performance ratio) but not good either. There's just no getting around the inherent flaws in the current revision of the Bulldozer architecture, even in the highly parallel workloads found in the server/workstation market:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5058/amds-opteron-interlagos-6200

And Knights Corner isn't serving the same market as Interlagos, so they're not really directly comparable.
 

LuckyDucky7

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Hmm.
You know what this is?

I think this is Intel's answer to ARM's server bids.

Think about it.
50+ cores at 1.2 GHz? That sounds a lot like what ARM will be promising in the near future.

Except that everyone who wants to go the low-power route needs to re-write their programs for the ARM instruction set. With this they don't have to. The tools for Xeon optimization are also the same.

So you can have a powerful 4/6/8/10-core Xeon processor (that you probably already own) but bolting this on, combined with Intel's advancements in power consumption (Sandy Bridge is already very good on idle battery life in notebooks), should make a changeover to ARM technology a hard sell.
 

zanny

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[citation][nom]oparadoxical_[/nom]Makes me wonder just what we will have in ten years from now... Especially for personal computers.[/citation]

GPUs like the 6970 have around 2500 vector cores. Like FPUs in the OP, they can't do the full spectrum of x86 instructions and can only do a specialized subset for one task.

Likewise, we have growing numbers of do everything cores on a die.

One important abstraction is that "cores" are just an FPU, SPU, TLB, etc, all on a die. A 4 core chip is basically 4 processors on one piece of silicon with one bus. A GPU is 2500 VPUs with shared memory, shared FPUs, and a shared bus and output.

The end game is that we have processor chips with specialized parts doing different, specialized tasks, all on one die. Like how Sandy Bridge had integrated graphics, that is just fancy abstraction for throwing a bunch of VPUs on the die that the CPU cores can access with their own bit of l3.

In a decade, expect processor chips to have much more cache, and a collection of VPUs / SPUs / etc on top of some registers and TLBs representing the limits of parallelism.

You merge the cores, and get processors of, say, 256 cores, where 64 of them are general purpose TLBs / Register sets and 192 are mixed FPU / VPUs doing hard computations for the general cores. If you add some floats, that work would be sent to an FPU to do, if you had a munch of float math in parallel, the process would have each operation delegated to an FPU.

Thats in mainstream computing, I think. Server markets are going towards specialized subset instruction set hardware that can't do normal computing tasks, but doesn't need to and actually shouldn't to save power. Every instruction you throw on the cpu pile means more transistors dedicated to operation decoding you could be using for more FPUs and such.
 

soccerdocks

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Do not fall for AMD's marketing. They do not a have 16 core chip. They have an 8 "module" chip that has 16 integer processors, but does NOT have 16 full cores.
 

whatisupthere

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[citation][nom]gmcizzle[/nom]Lol wow 50 cores. Guess that makes AMD's 16-core reveal another flop.[/citation]
This is a co-processor. The 6990 does 1.37 TFLOPs Double Precision and 5.40 TFLOPs Single Precision. The 7990 and above should be much higher.
 

sinfulpotato

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[citation][nom]danwat1234[/nom]So, Knight's corner is Larrabee?[/citation]

More or less, this took the design elements from the scrapped Larrabee project.
 

nebun

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[citation][nom]oparadoxical_[/nom]Makes me wonder just what we will have in ten years from now... Especially for personal computers.[/citation]
why wait 10 years...take a look at the mid line of graphic cards these days, they have at least 200+ cores....intel and amd are a little behind
 

psp09

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Wow, a lot of co processing data, will be very useful for engineers and graphic designers. Maybe 6 years from now.
 
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comparing amd's chip to this is comparing apples to oranges. ive always wondered if they would go this route cause to me it always seemed inefficient to stack more and more expensive powerful cores together conmpared to supplying a couple powerful cores and lots of slow cores together. since it can be coded by anyone the possibilities are endless
 
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