The IT gravy train has become seriously derailed
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Intel sticks 48 cores on a chip
INTEL HAS A CUNNING PLAN to kill off server stacks by putting shedloads of cores on a chip that it calls the "Single Chip Cloud" (SCC).
Chipzilla has attempted this before but its prototype then, the 80-core "Polaris" processor, tended to use too much power and didn't like other x86 computer code. Intel's SCC chip has half the number of cores of its earlier Polaris and contains 1.3 billion transistors.
It can run standard x86 software and consists of what are basically low powered cores that gain power by collectively working together.
It uses a third of the power of the Polaris and is accelerated with built-in hardware instructions for minimum communication delays.
Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner believes that one day we will drive to work in our jet car and replace a rack of gear with just one SCC server.
Professor Timothy Roscoe of ETH Zurich said he was very excited about the chip because it was a doddle to design OS architectures for future multicore and manycore systems using it. "The chip's memory system and message passing support are a great fit for us, and it's an ideal vehicle for us to test and validate our ideas," he said.
Apparently the SCC is an "exciting platform for data centre research" because the combination of fine-grained voltage and frequency control, together with the ability to shut off entire zones of the processor, means that designers can accurately investigate the balance between computation, memory, and I/O, he indicated.
David Andersen, assistant professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, said that the chip's massive parallelism gives boffins the ability to "investigate the degree of parallelism that will be needed from applications five years down the line to make the best use of emerging many-core platforms."
Dan Reed, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Extreme Computing, said the Vole is partnering with Intel to explore new hardware and software architectures supporting next-generation client plus cloud applications.
He said the Vole's early research with the SCC processor prototype has already identified many opportunities in intelligent resource management, system software design, programming models and tools, and future software ideas. µ
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I'm going to guess that this is nothing like a bunch of Atoms stuck together. My estimation of transistor count suggests P6 pedigree and I can't imagine anyone who would want 48 Atoms.
I hope you guys are just being sarcastic and that Justin doesn't actually believe we'll be driving to work in jet cars some day.
@ lol guys
thats because the memory controller intel used is AMDS TECH look it up silly.
Looks interesting.
As for the Larrabee talk, LOL. What else is there to really say? There is nothing to talk about yet on the hardware front, and Intel still has not shown that they can write a graphics driver for the abysmal GPUs they already have.
I'll get excited about Intel producing something on the graphics front when it is proven to actually have some compatibility first and foremost, and then if it can actually run something well enough to make use of the compatibility. It's useless if it is too slow, and it's even more useless if it won't get further than the desktop.
So far, Intel has failed at both of those, and I honestly don't expect Larrabee to be any different. i740 all over again, I suspect, for Larrabee.
@nee o: A computer will not become self-aware until humans write computer code that can become self aware. It has nothing to do with improving hardware. If a botnet wanted to kill off humanity, it would already have access to the necessary hardware.
@Dizzious/Mick: would a 'bunch of atoms duct taped together' be any worse than a 32-bit video card?
Now imagine this: cores that can either work independently as 32 bit, or two neighbors that can 'shift on the fly' and act as a single 64-bit cpu, or 4 that can act as a 128-bit cpu and become an encription monster.
@Rich Wargo: given that previous memory limitations have been overcome, I imagine Intel has it covered.
Remember when a dual-core pentium 4 with hyperthreading was 'bottlenecked' by it's 1066-mhz fsb and everyone said Intel couldn't match AMD because hypertransport was faster than FSB, then core duo came out and could do more with only a 666 mhz fsb?! Core 2 duo on an 800 mhz fsb kicked arse against AMD's 'faster' HT. The difference was in things like the memory controller and improved branch prediction, not the memory bandwidth - which was actually less at first!.
Well, Larrabee Is Finally Comeing Home, Its been 3 years of Promise, Promising, & Promises sumoore. Larrabee in BSN is described as 1 terra/s band. PS CELL is 100 Gb/s, Nv285 is 300 Gb/s Top ceiling knocker is less than 500 Gb/s ,so larrabeeIs Begining to Take Form.We Hope.
Single Chip Cloud is better. Coming Out of Mikes Lost Sock in Banglaore, 50 Foot Road turns Out OK. Except demo was bit Stinky, although very intresting, was Intels bit, Hummm.
Used term Aging Wafer. AGE is Photolith chemical,AGE Increases eveness & adhesion of Print material to substrate, NOT 6 Month in black box.INTEL Reuses term AGE incorrectly Over & Over, thru Years. Aging Might Be Press Launch to Develope buyers Intrest.
Light show on sales rep, yellow caught between wearers spectacles lens & eye of very Black Shadow, seemed more warning of yellow journalism than Facts.. Wafer itself was BLANK, NO Impression on It. Yet each chip is supposed to replace 10 conventional servers. Heck, Replace Whole system With Nutin'.
In ALL Not much New Was Stated, yet Might be Old Small Memory Footprint Best Friend. Larrabee ?#1, Single Chip Cloud, #?
drashek
I dare say thats essentially what it is, 48 atom cores! Notice how it runs x86, which typically refers to x86-32, and doesn't state x64 (x86-64). Having an x86-32 only processor for the role that they're suggesting for it is just plain stupid.
Memory access, both capacity and throughput, are the major bottlenecks facing a multicore chip.
Having 48 cores is fun until you get held up waiting for memory, or not having enough memory.
What is Intel doing to resolve that?
larrabee demo
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/12/2/intel-larrabee-finally-hits-1tflops---27x-faster-than-nvidia-gt200!.aspx
Who wants to bet its' just a bunch of Atoms duct-taped together?
@Nee O - Perhaps they should be giving it the codename "Wintermute"?
A neuralnet processor, a learning computer.
How long before one of these things become self aware and nukes us all?
These intel boffins are playing with fire I tells you, FIRE!
larrabee has migrated to the cpu socket...at least on a completely superficial and uninformed level..lol
The Zurich team would certainly know how to appreciate the Intel SCC chip as it reflects their research so well that it might as well be designed as an accelerator for a multi-kernel operating system. This is how the Microsoft involvement naturally follows (or precedes).