Intel offers promise of thousand multicore chips

THE FIRST sesh here at the Intel Developer Forum kicked off with Intel fellow Steve Pawlowski philosophising about multicore chips.

He said there was a raging debate going on about what multicores are within Intel, that is to say what place they occupy in the greater scheme of things.

Intel has decided to back off from power, voltage and the frequency of chips, and instead focus on features and software that could take advantage of the different cores.

He didn't say whether by 2010 Intel chips would have the equivalent brain power of a bumblebee by 2010. Another Intel fellow said five years ago Intel would be able to produce brains of a computer matching that of a bumblebee. He said by the year 2010 assuming that systems have equivalent to one or two teraflops. What we know is a bumble bee's brain is 500,000 neurons strong. And we know in its brief three to four weeks of life, it can produce millions of terror flaps.

It will be possible for Intel to provide multicores from the 10s to the 100s and even thousands if necessary. The idea is that by 2018 the process tech will be eight nanometers, using 256 billion transistors. By 2016 there will be 128 billion transistors on 11 nanometres.

Intel will use these additional transistors to take advantage of software applications. He said: We won't get the same performance or power benefits, but there will be new types of applications while Intel will bring supercomputing to the mainstream within the next 10 years and offer teraflops of performance.