Intel's "Terascale" Vision 220
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.
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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Doesnt matter (Score:2)
But now?
Maybe it will be "number of cores". Otherwise Intel and AMD will have to use meaningless slogans like "Intel inside" to suggest a sense of security when using their particular brand.
I expect a mixture of touting lots of cores and almost-fraudulent crap like "the Pentium III will make your internet faster".
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I have got to say (Score:2)
Obligatory Duke Nukem Forever Comment (Score:2)
Now we can have 80 DUPs at the same time (Score:2)
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Thank $Deity$ for dupes. I forgot to cancel my pre-order for a 10 ghz P4 CPU. But thanks to this dupe, I did cancel it and instead placed a pre-order on an 80 core CPU. YAY!
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well now it seems (Score:3, Funny)
CH
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"For balance" (Score:2)
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)
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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
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Good luck, I believe that particular problem (generalization, when some parallelism can be extracted within tasks) has been shown to be NP-hard. Even if you come up with a golly-gosh-whizzbang algorithm or pattern that takes maximum advantage of a multi-cpu system, you're still going to have a hard time forcing problems to fit it. My guess is that even
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It's sounds like you are using a fairly high end computer system. I have to sugestions for upgrades to it that would help reduce disk IO times and increase the speed.
1) RAM Drive
2) Solid State Hard Drives
Depending on your system and
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Re:80 Submissions (Score:4, Interesting)
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if every desktop is bound by I/O, then that's an interesting place to be.
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Granted it still needs a lot of work, but it might provide a faster system then the monolithic kernels of Linux and Windows.
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My hunch i
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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
Y'know, it's usually the application (Score:2)
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)
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I'm a sick, sick man.
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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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CPU0: Temperature above threshold
CPU0: Running in modulated clock mode
CPU80: Temperature above threshold
CPU80: Running in modulated clock mode
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Actually, as far as uses for it go, I think games will be pretty low on the list. Scientific computing will probably be far and away the number one use for it -- IBM will probably come up with a new supercomputer they can sell based on racks of those instead of racks of opterons, etc.
I'd also guess that NSA type agencies around the world would like them as well - X years of CPU time doesn't seem like much when you've got 80 of them in one box, and you've got acres of
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-Rick
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Why have 8 Oxen doing speculative operations (and failing most of the time) when you could have 80 chickens doing only what you needed.
i.e if you accept memory badwidth is your limit, then only do the instrucitons you have to. 200 processes across 80 cores doing only the things they have to vs a few cores doing branch prediction and guessin like hell, the chickens sounds like a better deal to me.
Re:Why have 8 strong ox? (Score:4, Funny)
"Boxen?"
Gotta love Brian Regen.
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)
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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...
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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
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Nope. That's what they made for the proof-of-concept demo, but ultimately they'll use something else. From TFA:
I'm betting Pentium Pro. Good, solid architecture, decent performance, still runs a lot of software. Wasn't the P-II basically just the PPro with MMX (and a half-speed cache...)? Hmmm, now tha
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From the CNet story "Intel's prototype uses 80 floating-point cores, each running at 3.16GHz, "
So these are just floating point cores.
And from the TFA you your sited.
"the cores in a terascale processor will be much simpler (kind of like we are seeing in the Cell processor design)."
In fact it was the line above the one you cited.
Just like TFA said. A Super Cell.
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Then why did they stick with Netburst for so long?
I don't think you can call Intel the most dominant processor design company. IBM is killing them in the very high end with the Power 5 and beat them out with design wins in the XBox 360, Gamecube, and PS/3.
Intel doesn't produce the fastest CPUs or and it is very possible if you count all the PPCs even the most popular.
They just h
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.
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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.
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However, I've not read anything that would suggest Intel isn't looking at improving memory and bus throughput. They'd be mad to think they can stick 80 cores into an existing system and have it do anything useful. I don't think even Intel are stupid enough to try and get away with that one.
I don't think 80 c
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)
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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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Neither Windows (NT+) nor Linux were "primarily designed for uniprocessing". Both platforms run on much larger than 16-way systems. Licensing issues are a different matter.
"So what will we have on these massive SMP architectures?"
Applications that won't use them for a while?
"Programming, at last we might be getting out from under VonNuman."
W
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Von Nueman(sp) is the uniprocessor architecture. Single bottle neck through which all data and instructions must pass.
I remember a time before x86 and the current x86 chips are just x86 on the surface. The x86 instruction set is
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Today it seems that all research must show a profit/product. Is any where looking to hire the cream of post docs, those with radical ideas and the skills to implement. How about tackling a big problem e.g.
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To answer your questions though, the reasearch is being done in the universities mostly, supplimented by the big corps. Microsoft has some excellent reasearch going on in this field that I have seen first hand, as does IBM and Google to name a few. The missing peice is still t
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Nothing wrong with academic research but it's rarely blue sky and if it's being funded by a business it's usually difficult to get info. Prehaps I'm looking in the wrong arenas
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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
Is it warm in here or is it just me? (Score:2)
OK, I'll bite (Score:2)
Data mining? How does having 80 cores improve I/O?
Memory bandwidth (Score:2)
Assuming this memory could be used smartly, segregating incoherent memory spaces (it seems rather obvious the dedicated memory would not be a coherent im
Terascale has scary applications (Score:2)
Okay, so I understand that AI is more compute-intensive than video. And I understand that it could be easier (tera instead of peta) if social reasoning isn't included. But really, Intel, I just don't want RMS on my computer.
Also, the jump from nanoscale to terascale may be impressive, but I don't think it'd be useful to have a transistor with a 310-million-mile-wide gate. Your device isn't goin
Before this will work (Score:2)
Also, this is something that intel/amd ar
who needs 80 core cpu ? (Not apolo spacecraft) (Score:2)
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
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Adding dedicated hardware for common tasks is not unusual, but in the long run it's commonly replaced with software. General purpose computing expands to consume all tasks as it gets faster. The best use of available die size is another blazingly fast CPU core, not specialized logic for specialized tasks that most people will not use.
There's a reason for the "S" in "SMP". The job of programming them is much easier.
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The answer is in this comment.
If 33 MHz "worked just fine" and TiVo upgraded anyway, why? Obviously they aren't under pressure from Intel, so the only answer can be "because 33 MHz CPUs did NOT work just fine". They wanted more content, more flexibility, more expandability, and needed a general purpose CPU. Theoretically you can make an ASIC for anything, but a general
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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
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My Pentium M can slow down from 1600 MHz to 600, and then there are additional throttling states that seem to be able to bring it down to the performance of a 386. I made mine do that when battery got low, and at the highest levels of slowdown you could easily notice that even routine things like scrolling text in a text editor started becoming slow.
For reference, I'm typing this on a dual Athlon MP 2000+. That means I've got two CPUs available. This is under Linux 112 proces
Re:We have a dupe! (Score:5, Funny)
Why doesnt the DUPE tag work anymore? (Score:2)
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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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How many hard drives can be attached to a single disk controller in a PC? A whole lot. Do you need more than that? If so, how many disk drives do you need? How many ethernet ports? What other high bandwidth I/O is there? None of this is the issue.