OMG... Intel is Unstoppable.

[celewign]

http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/02/11/intel_80_core/

Poor AMD. They're sucking up the dust.
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[turpit]

http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/02/11/intel_80_core/

Poor AMD. They're sucking up the dust.
-cm

Its just a tech demonstrator, and no threat to AMD. The scrap yards are full of non funtional prototypes that never made it to production statis.

 

[celewign]

You really think they are going to make a huge powerful processor and then SCRAP it??!?!!??! WTF. Of course not. This is the future, friend, right up there with the quantum computing.
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[turpit]

You really think they are going to make a huge powerful processor and then SCRAP it??!?!!??! WTF. Of course not. This is the future, friend, right up there with the quantum computing.
-cm

You really think they are going to spend thousands/millions/billions developing a hugely powerfull motorcycle/car/aircraft and then SCRAP IT????

Well, They did.

Its just a tech demonstrator. It doesnt mean we will ever see it. We may see its offspring, we may not. We certainly wont see that CPU though.

 

[joelkamper]

I am sure that Intel will be glad to sell you an 80-core CPU for your rig in a few years. That is, if you can fork over the $50k that Universities who need such power will gladly pay to have. Then you can see an increase of 2 frames per second in your games, which are still designed for single core CPU's and are being held back by your video card or RAM.

 

[nevesis]

80 cores will probably be the norm in X amount of years, considering the possibility's, for instance... what if each appliance in your house was connected via USB or wireless, etc to your new 80 core cpu, each appliance given its own CPU... makes sense??

 

[crazypyro]

http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/02/11/intel_80_core/

Poor AMD. They're sucking up the dust.
-cm

mega multi-core CPU's are old news already, i believe there was a 96 core RISC processor made within the last 6 months, (have to look it up i forget who made it). And then theres the CELL by IBM, multi-core, mega FP performance.

But software doesn't even take full use of a dual-core CPU now, and they've been out for a bout a year now. so in 2 more years i don't foresee software engineers writing software to utilize 80 cores.

Hardware is only as good as the software wrote for it.

 

[chunkymonster]

However, during a presentation, Intel dampened our hopes that such a processor would be in PCs or servers anytime soon. The company said that the 80-core chip is just a research chip that will not become a product for the commercial market...the company conceded that there may be a limit to how many processing cores on one die make sense...Intel indicated that...processor will increasingly gain from the simple addition of cores until 16 cores are reached. After that, the baseline performance of processor will benefit less from the addition of cores and other enhancements will become more important...cache improvements will take the center stage, followed by thread scheduling and new instructions.

We will not be seeing anything remotely like an 80 core proc for the desktop market. Also interesting in this article was the mention that Intel's roadmap looks very similiar ot AMD's with multicore processors and systems.

what if each appliance in your house was connected via USB or wireless, etc to your new 80 core cpu, each appliance given its own CPU

Connecting appliances to a home wide network was one of the visions of the Cell processor built into "smart" appliances.

Interesting article tho.

 

[3Ball]

It was said in the article that these processors would most likely not be on consumer production level, so in short. No!

Best,

3Ball

 

[Wombat2]

http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/02/11/intel_80_core/

Poor AMD. They're sucking up the dust.
-cm

This was a tech demo focusing on optical core-to-core communication. Its not designed for general purpose use.

 

[celewign]

Yeah, I know. THIS one isn't. Intel is going to use this though. This isn't one of those fancy cars or airplanes. People make those all the time as X models. Intel probably will not do this though. Can you imagine the implications of have +1 TF performance in a low wattage chip? You must be out of your mind to think that Intel won't sell this someday.

To Joelkamper: Stop approaching things from the view of a gamer. This won't impact games for a long long time. This is still big though, huge. I think this may be one of the most important articles CPU related that I've heard this year or last. This is waaay bigger than Core2 announcement, in terms of future impact.
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[4745454b]

Yeah, I know. THIS one isn't. Intel is going to use this though. This isn't one of those fancy cars or airplanes. People make those all the time as X models. Intel probably will not do this though. Can you imagine the implications of have +1 TF performance in a low wattage chip? You must be out of your mind to think that Intel won't sell something like this someday.
-cm

I fixed your quote, your welcome. This chip won't see the light of day in any real world use. What Intel will take from this is the knowledge of how to get many cores to talk to each other efficently. From there, they will design chips that have many cores per wafer. I don't know when they will start using this, seeing as they have V8 that doesn't need this technology.

 

[celewign]

Sigh... yes, I'm sorry. I clearly wasn't clear. I sortov thought that people would realize that I didn't mean that Intel would start selling THIS EXACT CHIP. I'm speaking of the future man, and this is it in some form.
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[MU_Engineer]

This looks very much like a GPU core modified for FPU work, to tell the truth. The stripped-down tiles, the routing interface, interconnect speeds- it smacks of it. And GPUs are good at FPU work, too- a 90nm Radeon x1900 XT can do something like 300 double-precision GFlops while drawing about 100 W. The Intel unit is 65nm and does 1000 single-precision GFlops while burning about 100 W. It's powerful for sure, but it's NOT an x86 CPU and it is NOT a general-purpose unit by any stretch. The best I see this doing is being a preview of Intel's GPU that they're rumored to be building or a stream processor/math coprocessor.

And for the "Intel is unstoppable" bit...you forget that AMD owns ATi and they also make GPU cores and stream processors that are competitive with this unit. It's a feat, sure, but it's not that unusual or unique. 80 general-purpose x86 cores would have been, but this isn't.

 

[celewign]

And for the "Intel is unstoppable" bit...you forget that AMD owns ATi and they also make GPU cores and stream processors that are competitive with this unit.

But they aren't. At least, they aren't making things that people will percieve as "forward looking". Good point about the GPU thing, though. Intel making GPUs? Intel buying NVidia? Who knows.
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[exit2dos]

At least, they aren't making things that people will percieve as "forward looking".

Let's give them some time to integrate.
http://yahoo.reuters.com/news/articlehybrid.aspx?storyID=urn:newsml:reuters.com:20070212:MTFH29369_2007-02-12_20-59-40_L12645870&type=comktNews&rpc=44

the newly merged companies would work out this year exactly how they could combine their graphics and computer-processing know-how.

After that, it would take about two years to bring a product to market, he told Reuters in an interview at the 3GSM wireless trade fair in Barcelona.

"That could easily be 2009,"

 

[ches111]

Crazy,

Please do not make comments like the one above.

People are making applications (Games and Professional) NOW that take advantage of multiple cores.

And by the way, if you read around you would also understand that most devs that are working on multi core architectures do not limit their work to two cores. They use the available resources. This is a standard coding practice for anyone in multi core/multi thread environment.

Also, The concept of a thread per processor is flawed as well. Typically in a multi threaded application you may have many many threads assigned per proc.

Please have a read of these two threads for a better understanding of these two concepts:

First


Second

There are a lot of misconceptions which need to be addressed.

Please do not believe me "Do the research yourself".

 

[JonathanDeane]

However, during a presentation, Intel dampened our hopes that such a processor would be in PCs or servers anytime soon. The company said that the 80-core chip is just a research chip that will not become a product for the commercial market...the company conceded that there may be a limit to how many processing cores on one die make sense...Intel indicated that...processor will increasingly gain from the simple addition of cores until 16 cores are reached. After that, the baseline performance of processor will benefit less from the addition of cores and other enhancements will become more important...cache improvements will take the center stage, followed by thread scheduling and new instructions.

We will not be seeing anything remotely like an 80 core proc for the desktop market. Also interesting in this article was the mention that Intel's roadmap looks very similiar ot AMD's with multicore processors and systems.

what if each appliance in your house was connected via USB or wireless, etc to your new 80 core cpu, each appliance given its own CPU

Connecting appliances to a home wide network was one of the visions of the Cell processor built into "smart" appliances.

Interesting article tho.

I would have to say that yes some day we will be using 80 or more cores. Do I think that would be usefull now ? No.... (Still if I could buy one I would in a heart beat the geek factor is too strong to ignore !)

I would have to say that statement is like the "640K should be enough for ever" statement. I guess no one actualy said it but its quoted enough

I remember my first large hard drive 6.4GB's OMG !!! so huge I could never fill such a monster....

 

[balister]

You really think they are going to make a huge powerful processor and then SCRAP it??!?!!??! WTF. Of course not. This is the future, friend, right up there with the quantum computing.
-cm

You really think they are going to spend thousands/millions/billions developing a hugely powerfull motorcycle/car/aircraft and then SCRAP IT????

Some Chrysler engineers were having fun and it was never serious.

You do realize that, like the B-57, the Soviets were threatening war if the B-70 was every realized as a production bomber. At the time both the B-57 and B-70 were made, there was nothing the Soviets could do the counter them (the flew too high and too fast for the Soviet missile defenses). The official reasoning behind scraping the B-70 was because of difficulty in flying and one of the prototypes crashing during tests, but the Soviets were afraid of the capabilities of this bomber (it could cruise at Mach 3 with its engines mostly idling due to the advanced design of the wing tips to trap the supersonic shockwave and push the bomber forward). The only reason they didn't go to war over the B-1 was the techinical problems it had and they had the radar to actually see it even with it's stealth technologies.

Well, They did.

Its just a tech demonstrator. It doesnt mean we will ever see it. We may see its offspring, we may not. We certainly wont see that CPU though.

What, you mean like Intel's V8? I see Intel very much going forward with this 80 core processor for the Supercomputer market which is what this monster is being designed for. You will not see an 80 Core processor sitting on the general users desktop, this is for people like Pixar, ILM, NSA, the US Research labs, and anyone else that needs to do a huge number of computations in a reasonable amount of time.

This isn't a tech demonstrator, this is something that Intel wants to build for a very niche, but very lucrative, market.

 

[CaptRobertApril]

This isn't a tech demonstrator, this is something that Intel wants to build for a very niche, but very lucrative, market.

I can assure you that in that "very niche market" sit I. Damn, I don't care if I have to heist every shop on Rodeo Drive to get the money, I'd be one of the first customers for that 80 corer!!! 8)

 

[akahuddy]

Boy were those ever beautiful birds!

 

[1Tanker]

You really think they are going to make a huge powerful processor and then SCRAP it??!?!!??! WTF. Of course not. This is the future, friend, right up there with the quantum computing.
-cm

Why not? Companies like GM, etc. do...with cars.

Ooops...didn't see Turpits post.... My bad.

 

[KlamathBFG]

http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/02/11/intel_80_core/

But software doesn't even take full use of a dual-core CPU now, and they've been out for a bout a year now. so in 2 more years i don't foresee software engineers writing software to utilize 80 cores.

I think there is more to it than that, changing single core software to support 2 cores is in many ways more difficult than changing 2 core software to support n cores (I say n as 80 would be a pretty high number of simultaneous multi-threaded paths for most software although I could see games being one of the pieces of software that could easily spawn that many paths).

The big problem for developers is the re-engineering required to spawn, track and combine multiple paths (changing from 1 to more than 1) tracking 5, or 20 or 80 instead of 1 is reasonably easy once you have the functionality setup to spawn, track and combine. (P.S, one of the reasons why you haven't seen that much multi-core software is it actually adds quite a bit of over-head to most apps doing all this, not to mention you often have to wait for the last path to complete before presenting results.)

Answering the original question though there is no chance in hell that you will be able to buy an 80 core processor for your PC in 24 months / 2 years.

To build 80 core processors at reasonable yields they would need to fit about 40 cores in the same area of silicon that they currently are fitting 2/4, that's in effect going from 65nm to about 10/14nm and I don't think current road-maps have that happening inside 2 years.

5-10 years definitely and the software may even be ready by then.

 

[Pippero]

And for the "Intel is unstoppable" bit...you forget that AMD owns ATi and they also make GPU cores and stream processors that are competitive with this unit.

But they aren't. At least, they aren't making things that people will percieve as "forward looking". Good point about the GPU thing, though. Intel making GPUs? Intel buying NVidia? Who knows.
-cm
Those cores are very simple, you can see them as a single shader in one of these new unified shader architectures.
So, if they told you that G80 has "128 cores", would you say that nVidia is "unstoppable"?
While the 80 cores architecture is very interesting, is not something new, and it's clear that the whole industry is going in that direction (however, we have to give credit to STI for being first to implement such an approach into a product, Cell), with streaming processors and "Fusion".
But i'm still curious to see what kind of consumer applications will emerge to make use of all that parallel FP power, apart from image processing.

 

[fullmetal001]

what man, whats the point in quad core cpus, they dont utilise the full power because there are hardly any software that does, why would u need a 80 core cpu?? firstly it would proberly cost u a shite load of money, and with no use to it if it only uses 1 core well maybe 1 and a half if ure lucky....