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.

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

  • 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!

  • http://billso.com 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

    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!

  • http://billso.com 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.

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