News Intel Introduces Silverthorne and Tukwila

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/02/05/intel_introduces_silverthorne_and_tukwila_at_isscc/1

On one hand Intel offers an ultra low power, ultra tiny 45nm single core processor, on the other a 2Bn transistor quad core behemoth with 30MB of on-die cache!

 

ME WANT TUKWILA!

 

Hot damn, 30MB of cache... Want one... Any word on release? 2009?

 

You do realise that being an Itanium, its going to predominantly be in behemoths from HP et al with price tags from 6 figures into the millions

We're not talking about a drop-in Core2 replacement here.

 

I know, It still has a level of wantage though...

 

Yea Itanium is NOT x86 architecture - it's IA - Intel Architecture. The two aren't directly compatible.

 

And even then, a million quid Itanium uber-server would still get its ass handed to it by a modest C2D setup in gaming performance. That is, if you could get the game to even run on what's likely to be a pretty obscure, if not proprietary OS.

I know, I'm no fun

I'm kind of surprised that Intel is going to continue to pursue the IA architecture, with blades taking over the world and all. But I suppose if you need a thousand cores in one box for some reason, you don't have a great deal of choice in the matter.

 

It's pursuing it since the expectation is that it plans to continue it with 80-core(esq) teraflop parts with memory stacking and it's also been hinted that Larabee (GPU? GPGPU) will likely be IA too.

If Intel didn't have so much money, IA would have died long ago.

 

I guess its just a matter of them continuing to develop the technology, so they may as well try to sell a few while they're at it.

The number of Itanium boxes in "my" datacentre has gone down by what's likely to be an order of magnitude in the last couple years, swapped out by blades for the most part.

 

as long as AMD continues sucking (majorly), innovation from intel will continue to diminish....but they will be sure to let you know what they're working on....I mean aren't they already working on the 2nd-gen 80-core CPU?

 

qft

 

You could load the machine with a linux for IA distro and run it in Cedega

Granted there is unlikley to be any performance advantage, I'm just saying it could be done.

Does it bother anyone else when the chips are named after places you've been? I have no idea what Silverthorne is, but Tukwila is a dumpy suburban part of the Greater Seattle-Tacoma Urban Sprawl (It's the part between the south end of Seattle and the airport). Tukwila is best know for it's strip clubs, so hopefully this is optimized for porn servers!

 

I couldn't stop laughing after reading that.

 

With smaller architectur, numbers of diagnostic cancer are rising.... Health people :|

 

are you trying to say that smaller architectures cause cancer?

if so, learn one of the primary principles of statistics: just because data follows a similar pattern, doesn't mean its related.

its like the old example of the ice cream sales vs shark attacks.

they both go up over the same time period, but that isn't due to being interconnected. there is a third factor that might not be known execpt by investigation. in that case the number of people on th beach increases during the summer.

and the correlation could be like this: Smaller architecture, more computing power, better tools for early detection and better detection of cancers that are harder to detect.

 

So do you think Glider could get Gentoo onto this without any RAM, one of his servers only has 18MB so I think a 30MB cache would be plenty?
I don't think Cedega would work though as it only works on X86 architecture, you would have to specifically code it for that architecture like they do for the PowerPC in older Macs. (Hmm The PS3's core is based on the powerPC architecture isn't it? Do you think they could get Starcraft playing on the PS3?)

 

depends if you had an instruction set to convert x86 to IA

that can be done either in hardware or software.

I'm sure it could be done as proof of concept, but would take some work and ingenuity (and Intel would probably pay mega bucks for it as it would open up IA a bit)