News Intel builds 80-core prototype

Anakha, it doesn't necessarily mean that: look at the 8800GTX. It has 128 "stream processors" all of which do insane amounts of FP work...

 

From the EETimes article linked in the story it looks like you are correct:

The "different flavors" worries me a little in terms of flexibility. I guess it all comes down to how versatile those different cores are. The odd thing is that, as I understand it, DX10 GPUs are actually getting more flexible chips than previous generations.

 

I think the planned order is 65nm --> 45nm --> 32nm --> 22nm --> ??

And I'm not sure, but, I think the "halves in size" relates more to area than length...so 65/2 isn't equal to 45...but 65^2 = 2*45^2 (roughly). For the sizes in my memory (130nm, 90nm, 65nm, 45nm, 32nm, 22nm), the halving of "area" seems to hold more true than the halving of "length." If that holds true, then after 22nm we'll see something around 15 or 16nm.

Ummm, sortof. In my version of Windows XP-Pro (and on my old Hyperthreaded Intel Pentium 4, that looks like 2 processors to the OS), if I go into task manager (ctrl-alt-delete), and look at the programs running, I can right click and set the processor "affinity" for each one -- so I can make individual programs run exclusively on either of my virtual CPU's. I'd imagine you can do the same on true dual and quad-core processors.

 

This is very similar to the Cell Processor (the one in the PS3) that has 8 separate SPE's (cores). Considering that is in production now i can only see the cell producing the same kind of cores in much short a time frame. I was under the impression that task specific processors/cores required much greater time to code though which could be a hindrance.

 

Bit ran an article about Valve's implementation of multicore support in Source, which goes into quite a bit of detail about dedicating threads for different 'areas' of the engine (physics, audio etc.) and how they went about coding it.

Found it pretty interesting myself

Ok, well technically Moore's Law states that every 24 months, the amount of transistors on a die will double. For this to happen, it's my understanding that the transistors ideally have to become half of the size they were 2 years hence. So as you've pointed out, die size does come into it too.

If you plotted date/process size, you'd see a pretty strong correlation along x=y, but it's obvious that the Law isn't much of a Law, as instead a general rule of thumb. There's something like this on the Wiki article, which better explains it.

It's been sagging under expectation, but climbing back again.

 

Without a complete OS and software overhaul, these processors will not make it into the general consumer market.

While Windows Vista may be multi-threaded it damn sure is not massively multi-threaded enough to make of more than about 4 cores or so.

Then all programs will have to almost completely re-written to actually make use of this kind of processor - or it will just end up running slower than before.

So, I think these might make it into server markets, but not consumer markets.

 

Thanks for the further info...I got more interested, since the image you linked didn't go far enough to include Core2Duo...so I actually looked up some more numbers. Interestingly, I found that the Pentium D 900 series had 376 Million transistors, while the Core 2 Duo dropped back down to 291 Million. Of course, the Core 2 Quad jumps back forward to 582 Million transistors.

I found the info in the tables on this and this page.

 

Thanks for the links EQC, You know, I had seen that before but it keeps amazing me that AMD is using 154M transistors on their X2s and ahead of the Pentium D which has more that twice as many and while the C2D is faster it still uses almost double - No I'm not an AMD fanboy, my last CPU purchase was an e6300, but I am still impressed by AMD for this.

 

80 cores.. wow, will there ever be a limit?

 

I will never need more than 640k cores.