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Intel's "Terascale" Vision
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Sep 27, 2006 03:15 PM
from the 80-cores-and-nothing-on dept.
from the 80-cores-and-nothing-on dept.
Vigile writes, "Intel is pushing the envelope with its latest vision — 80 cores on a single processor. Dubbed 'Terascale' computing, Intel aims to bring low-powered, massively interconnected cores and unleash a new era in data-mining, media creation, and entertainment." For balance, read Tom Yager over at InfoWorld imploring AMD to stop at 8 cores while everybody gets the architecture right.
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Hardware: Intel Shows 48-Core x86 Processor 366 comments
Vigile writes "Intel unveiled a completely new processor design today the company is dubbing the 'Single-chip Cloud Computer' (but was previously codenamed Bangalore). Justin Rattner, the company's CTO, discussed the new product at a press event in Santa Clara and revealed some interesting information about the goals and design of the new CPU. While terascale processing has been discussed for some time, this new CPU is the first to integrate full IA x86 cores rather than simple floating point units. The 48 cores are set 2 to a 'tile' and each tile communicates with others via a 2D mesh network capable of 256 GB/s rather than a large cache structure. "
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Good (Score:4, Funny)
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Not really.
This chip (as designed) would be one CISC CPU core and 80 Mini cores (kinda like Cell?)
Anyway, where this will be awesome is in rendering &&|| Cryptography, where the memory bandwith requirements is not as high as CPU compute requirements.
I personally hope these come out in a 4xPCIe expansion card:)
-nB
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I have got to say (Score:2)
Obligatory Duke Nukem Forever Comment (Score:2)
well now it seems (Score:3, Funny)
CH
80 Submissions (Score:4, Funny)
I like the idea of an 80 core processor. Multithreaded applications will work better. Why are people afraid of multiprocessors? Systems with dozens of processors are not uncommon. I dont see why it would be bad for the desktop.
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Re:80 Submissions (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Ironically, the nature of MATrix LABoratory's design goals is particularly suitable for multi-processor implimentations. The language is expressly designed to allow/coax users into
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If anything, this will be the one great thing to come out of 8+ core desktop systems. I honestly don't think "most" apps even pretend to use more than 1 core very well. Once 8+ cores are one your bare bones Dell home PC then I'd expect to see everything under the sun start to be multithreaded. With the expectation of 32+ or 64+ cores in a decade time, then I could see alot
Re:80 Submissions (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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Recently, some of our managers wanted to see what it would cost to purchase a system that would significantly outperform our 8-way Opteron
Not a good way to speed up general purpose apps (Score:3, Informative)
Multithreading models from the Windows/Unix/Linux community all assume equal access to system resources such as memory across all threads. They like Uniform Memory Architecture models.
An 80 core system can't really provide a uniform memory access model, as it runs into severe switching and coherency problems. (You want to snoop HOW MANY L1 caches?!??). Fancy interconnects like hyperchannel and Monte Carlo stochastic scheme
Time to go home... (Score:5, Funny)
Man, it's been a long day.
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Nope. I got "Intel's Tentacle Vision".
Either way, gives new meaning to "pervasive computing". (Or is that "invasive"?)
E.
Re:Time to go home... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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I'm a sick, sick man.
Why have 8 strong ox? (Score:4, Interesting)
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CH
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Tho is *seems* that if the OS was written specifically for 80 cores (ie: 64 bit, one bit per core or something) then *if* they synced up nicely, you could do some cool stuff with games at the least. My guess is that getting the OS to work with 80 cores in near real time is going to produce some serious overhead, however. For what it is worth, $10 s
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Re:Why have 8 strong ox? (Score:4, Funny)
"Boxen?"
Gotta love Brian Regen.
Parent
In other news (Score:4, Funny)
80 cores... (Score:4, Funny)
Didn't sun try this? (Score:2)
Didn't Sun try that sort of idea with the UltraSparc T1? If I recall correctly, while the concept of lots of light cores was cool, the real-world performance didn't do any better than Intel- or AMD-based systems.
steve
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Intel's "Terascale" Vision (Score:5, Funny)
While 80 cores is pretty ridiculous... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if Intel never sells a chip bigger than 16 or 32 ways, an 80 core lab mule will teach them many things about how to get information to a processor and keep those caches full of appropriate data.
-F
Someone needs to relearn SI (Score:5, Informative)
Why stop there? (Score:3, Funny)
Pentium - Stove-top model (Score:2, Insightful)
The 4 X 80 "stove top" model will come out later that year. It will include an "oven" that has its own chip and convectional cooling.
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Reminded me of Grade School (Score:3, Funny)
AMD: We now have two cores, so there!
Intel: Oh yeah, well we now have four cores- losers!
AMD: Oh yeah, well we're coming out with eight cores next. Ha beat that!
Intel: We can and will! We're going to come out with, with EIGHTY cores! Yeah that's right, eighty cores!
Disclaimer: I've not kept up on the Core War, so any inaccuracies are for dramatic effect...
Note an X86 but more of a super Cell. (Score:2)
It is of interest for say super computers and video cards. It isn't the prototype of the Octodec80Core that will be in the new 72" iMac.
Yea it is a dupe alright.
What I think a lot of people are missing is that it almost looks like Intel is going to repeat the mistakes with Netburst all over again.
Now instead of a clock speed race Intel is starting a core race.
Intel is sticking more and more cores onto it's current FSB. This is go
Lots of uses for 80 processors (Score:5, Interesting)
all of that is threadable.
so is photographic processing. You can divide a picture 80 ways and have each processor do whatever it is you want to do on it.
Gamers? Fscking a.... i'm so SICK of hearing hiow everything is for them. Just because something isn't going to help Halo Life 3 run faster is not any of my concern.
There are lots of people working on their computers that want to see more cores because it will make our lives better.
Heeeere we go again. (Score:5, Insightful)
That didn't work because AMD worked out that architecture can trump speed. They innovated, and then did it again with decent dual-core (as in NOT the two-dies-on-one-chip cack that you churned out at first).
So, you improved your architecture and implemented dual-core properly, to produce the fantastic Duo. You got back in the race.
And then there was talk of more cores. And you went "Fuck that, bitches, stay DOWN - we is gon' fuck you up good with 80 cores, bitch, an' dat hard!". Yes, you decided to try and dominate the pissing contest of multi-core instead of megahurtz.
Jesus guys, didn't you learn a fucking thing? STOP trying to turn out something that little bit "more" than the competition, just get on with innovating and coming up with damn good chips. That's how AMD threatened you and, if you go on with this "anything you can do" shit again, you'll be back to square one.
Memory busses are for swapping (Score:5, Insightful)
What's a memory bus? Oh right, that thing you use to access the DDR4 swap device when the page you want to access is no longer in the on-CPU RAM. ;-)
Seriously, look at the growth of L2 caches, and tell me the day isn't coming when they just call it "RAM" instead of "cache." If Intel and AMD want to keep piling transistors onto their chips, this'll give 'em something to do.
640 cores (Score:5, Funny)
Arrgghhh (Score:4, Interesting)
We have had multi processor machines for ages. This is not a sudden unknown. Look up transputer, connection machine, beowulf, cray. There is still ground to be covered but it's not unkown territory. The difference is this is intel, intel needs a big market to sell to.
This is not going to make significant difference to the end user, most of them will still write letters, calculate spreadsheets and browse the web. It might be enough to finally expose MS et al for what they have always been, the parasites.
Where this is going to hit home is in the realm of programming and OS.
Want to run an OS primarily designed for uniprocessing on a multi way architecture? Look at the issues Win&Lin have with SMP, limited to 16 processors I believe. Numa and beowulf are a different kettle of fish. So what will we have on these massive SMP architectures?
Programming, at last we might be getting out from under VonNuman. Progress might be possible after 30+ years of stagnation. The symbolic/functional languages are going to start to move forward. Hell we might even get to run on stack based cpus with energy reclamation automated
But given then history of software we'll have a bunch of ignorant, loud mouth idiots running around telling everybody the one true way is Java with mutex and semaphores. PHBs will grab at the first thing that has enterpise written on it and is 'guaranteed'. Most programmers will code how they have always coded head down, ass up. The number of processors will double every two years and the speed of software will continue to halve in the same period.
Of course nobody will suggest that a staged conversion should take place. There will be all these reasons to throw everything away and start over. Because this time we'll get it right!
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In Genetic programming, we had heirarchial GP a couple years ago, breaking thro
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GA/GP searches a problem space for answers using a distributed hill climbing algorithm. It isn't a magic bullet for all problems, but performs well when the fitness of the solution set is a contiguous function and the slopes of the fitness hyperplane are not too extreme. If the fitness landscape is not contiguous, then GA/GP is unlikely to outperform random search by very much.
For instance: If your problem is "Devise a key that will open this lock", then G
Re:Make each core specialized!! (Score:5, Insightful)
As an example, people talk about using using multi-GHz machines for TIVO-type appliances, and "getting away" with 600 Mhz or so if your card has hardware MPG encoding. Some of the original TIVOs, because of their reliance on specialized chips and ASICs, used measly 33 MHz CPUs - and worked just fine.
steve
Parent
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Besides, 1 core would be better than several in many respects. Say, if you've got a web server, or a database or whatever this means that each process/thread only can get up to 1/80 of the processor's capabilities, unless the program is coded in such a way it can take advantag
Re:We have a dupe! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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It's disconcertingto me how much Latin and general linquistics I am now burdened with to understand contemporary branding. How long before we start seeing IMG SOURCE="icon128.gif" ALT="The Ancient Rune Previously Known as Intel" ?
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