May 13, 2010 at 22:27Forty-core processor in action, or the return of the P54
Last week I was in Brussels on business. Among other things, there was the vision of a working computer on a 48-core processor with x86 architecture, which was shown on Research @ Intel. Honestly, I wanted to look at the beast. Forty-eight cores! Well this is dropsy, at least! And even that is more sophisticated. And a ten kilowatt power supply! And then you go into the room, and there ... the usual system unit.
The usual bigtower, inside quite an ordinary propeller on a medium-sized radiator. Honestly, I've seen bigger ones on Core 2 Duo.
I can’t say what power the power supply can, because they removed the stickers from it, and wrapped the excess with an opaque adhesive tape. But nothing terrifying in appearance. And it is known that under maximum load the processor consumes 125 watts, and during idle time - only 25.
So what's the catch?
Yes, the fact that the cores in the processor are not simple, but the good old P54. Let me remind you that these were used in the second generation of Pentium processors operating at a frequency of 75 to 200 MHz. Only then P54 was made using the technology of 0.6 microns, and now transferred to 45 nm. As a result, all 48 cores, together with four memory controllers and 24 special routers (routers) that provide effective interaction with the latter, occupy approximately the same area as the original P54 with its one single core.
The processor frequency was not disclosed, but it is unlikely to be very high. After all, his task is not to set speed records, but to serve as a testing ground for next-generation software testing. Now programmers are racking their brains about how to use 4-6 cores normally, and then immediately 48 in one chip! And, as far as I know, this is not the limit - if necessary, you can put a few hundred. So what is 6 cores compared to this abundance? So, a dull semblance of Hyper-Threading ...
In the meantime, everything is so sampled that even the memory of the video adapter is located on a regular laptop module.
In Intel itself, the processor is positioned as a prototype of a cloud computer in one chip. And here, it’s not even a performance issue that comes out on top, but which network interfaces will serve this miracle. At least the prototype doesn't even smell like regular Ethernet.
About other future Intel products, I wrote a rather large article on 3Dnews, if interested, welcome.
And the secret is revealed there - why processor manufacturers do not take a steam bath when they mark expensive crystals with cheap ones. Fans of unlocking AMD's cores can sleep peacefully :)
The usual bigtower, inside quite an ordinary propeller on a medium-sized radiator. Honestly, I've seen bigger ones on Core 2 Duo.
I can’t say what power the power supply can, because they removed the stickers from it, and wrapped the excess with an opaque adhesive tape. But nothing terrifying in appearance. And it is known that under maximum load the processor consumes 125 watts, and during idle time - only 25.
So what's the catch?
Yes, the fact that the cores in the processor are not simple, but the good old P54. Let me remind you that these were used in the second generation of Pentium processors operating at a frequency of 75 to 200 MHz. Only then P54 was made using the technology of 0.6 microns, and now transferred to 45 nm. As a result, all 48 cores, together with four memory controllers and 24 special routers (routers) that provide effective interaction with the latter, occupy approximately the same area as the original P54 with its one single core.
The processor frequency was not disclosed, but it is unlikely to be very high. After all, his task is not to set speed records, but to serve as a testing ground for next-generation software testing. Now programmers are racking their brains about how to use 4-6 cores normally, and then immediately 48 in one chip! And, as far as I know, this is not the limit - if necessary, you can put a few hundred. So what is 6 cores compared to this abundance? So, a dull semblance of Hyper-Threading ...
In the meantime, everything is so sampled that even the memory of the video adapter is located on a regular laptop module.
In Intel itself, the processor is positioned as a prototype of a cloud computer in one chip. And here, it’s not even a performance issue that comes out on top, but which network interfaces will serve this miracle. At least the prototype doesn't even smell like regular Ethernet.
About other future Intel products, I wrote a rather large article on 3Dnews, if interested, welcome.
And the secret is revealed there - why processor manufacturers do not take a steam bath when they mark expensive crystals with cheap ones. Fans of unlocking AMD's cores can sleep peacefully :)