Intel shows off their 80 core processor

Yea I heard of this chip in development a while back. Personally, I am an advocate of parallel computing, and unlike many programmers I do enjoy programming in parallel architectures (with MPI). So I do hope this trend continues.

On the other hand it seems like this processor is very, very inefficient. Looks like 6 50A cables connected to that board! For a single chip thats just ridiculous. Furthermore, the chip is clocked at 5Ghz and I can image the heat it puts out (is that a phase change?). Lastly, it seems like with all of the big figures this chip has (80 cores, 5Ghz), 1.6 Teraflops seems kind of lame... I mean an 8-core IBM cell chip, which does not require as much energy or produce as much heat, theoretically can hit 2 Tflops.


BTW, kinda off topic; too many Indians working for Intel (must be the IIT connection). I just hope they'd hire a Bengali once in a while. Not that most of you'd be able to tell the difference anyways.
 
javisaman said:
Yea I heard of this chip in development a while back. Personally, I am an advocate of parallel computing, and unlike many programmers I do enjoy programming in parallel architectures (with MPI). So I do hope this trend continues.

On the other hand it seems like this processor is very, very inefficient. Looks like 6 50A cables connected to that board! For a single chip thats just ridiculous. Furthermore, the chip is clocked at 5Ghz and I can image the heat it puts out (is that a phase change?). Lastly, it seems like with all of the big figures this chip has (80 cores, 5Ghz), 1.6 Teraflops seems kind of lame... I mean an 8-core IBM cell chip, which does not require as much energy or produce as much heat, theoretically can hit 2 Tflops.


BTW, kinda off topic; too many Indians working for Intel (must be the IIT connection). I just hope they'd hire a Bengali once in a while. Not that most of you'd be able to tell the difference anyways.
Click to expand...

yeah it's phase change. Think of how much power your 2 cores need, then multiply it by 40, and then adjust for heat.
 
cerebrex said:
yeah it's phase change. Think of how many amps your 2 cores need, then multiply it by 40, and then adjust for heat.
Click to expand...

Well these cores are obviously much smaller than the either of the dual cores. So technically speaking they should be more energy efficient individually. Also I don't think all 80 cores are full blown CPUs, maybe their analogous to the SPEs of the cell.
 
My friend was trying to intern at a company developing one thousand core processors :eek:

They were 8 bit PPC processors, granted, but apparently the thing performs at insane rates, is reprogrammable on the fly, and used something like 10watts of electricity total.
 
javisaman said:
BTW, kinda off topic; too many Indians working for Intel (must be the IIT connection). I just hope they'd hire a Bengali once in a while. Not that most of you'd be able to tell the difference anyways.
Click to expand...


LMAO!
 
They said they wanted to make a 64-core desktop chip by 2010. This 80-core, umm, not desktop chip in 2007 makes that goal look achievable now.
 
javisaman said:
BTW, kinda off topic; too many Indians working for Intel (must be the IIT connection). I just hope they'd hire a Bengali once in a while. Not that most of you'd be able to tell the difference anyways.
Click to expand...

I would almost go so far as to say their hiring practices are racist in Hillsboro... not going to comment further.
 
Assuming the demo was built on the 65nm process than it should be viable on 45. The cores are crippled so I'm wondering if they'll one or two normal CPU cores like they did for cell, that could make it X86 (it'd work a lot like fusion then).

I still don't get why it's 80 cores...
 
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