Intel’s 80-core processor

by billso on Sunday, 23 March 2008

Thirteen months ago, Intel showed off a prototype CPU with EIGHTY cores on the same piece of silicon. It uses about as much electricity as a traditional desktop CPU. This news.com article has some information:

Intel used 100 million transistors on the chip, which measures 275 millimeters squared. By comparison, its Core 2 Duo chip uses 291 million transistors and measures 143 millimeters squared.

The hard part of the design isn’t putting the cores on the same die. The chips have to talk with each other. Routers on the silicon die help assign computations to individual chips, and move finished computations to neighboring chips.

It’s a prototype, so the chips are very basic. It’s incompatible with Intel’s x86 platform. Writing software for a multi-core CPU is difficult, so the demonstrations are very limited. The chips need their own RAM, because external RAM modules like those used in personal computers won’t work. Wikipedia’s article on multicore processors is a good read, and the reference list is helpful.

Intel has a web page about the project, and here’s two YouTube videos with more details.

Tagged as: CPU, electricity, hardware, Intel, power, video, YouTube

billso

I remember installing my first mathco!

And yes, there's always a bottleneck. Internet bandwidth seems to be more of a factor now than ever.

dpeters1

It would be nice if programmers made up their minds. In the beginning processors did everything. Then they needed math coprocessors. Skip forward and heavier tasks such as graphics are offset to video cards that have their own Graphic Processing Units. Heck, gaming companies even started to make Physics Cards to handle the complex math of rag-doll physics and the like.

Better programs with faster performance has always been an issue of shoving work to another processor. I recall ATI wanting to change this and remerge CPUs with GPUs but perhaps that doesn't fit into an Nth-Cored future.

All of this processing power is awesome, but there will be a bottleneck somewhere else. Installing patches and scanning files will still rely on a hard drive (SSD to the rescue here?). Performing complex number crunching will need more ram and incredible FSB speeds to operate efficiently. Despite this, we've got Moore's Law to keep up with. Excelsior!

billso

It looks like at least one core per app is the goal. It's not uncommon for smartphones and digital media players to have multiple processors. The iPhone has a Samsung CPU and a graphics coprocessor.

Of course, managing these multi-core chipsets can be complex. Should idle cores be assigned other tasks that are less urgent, like retrieving patches or scanning files?

dpeters1

Do we need more cores? It seems as if programmers aren't really jumping on the parallel processing bandwagon in droves or anything. Then again, maybe an 80 core processor is just what we need to get that ball rolling.

Now that i think about it though... I want my Mp3 player to have one core, my Browser to have another, maybe one for notepad.exe (with yet another core reserved exclusively for handling the copy/paste clipboard buffer of course).

After watching the youtubes, I'm thinking that's not exactly how the system would work, but it's still a novel idea to have 1 processor core per application!