News Microsoft presses Intel for 16-core Atom

Microsoft is looking to Intel to develop a many-core, system-on-chip Atom design.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/01/28/microsoft-intel-16-core-atom/1

 

How about many core processors for desktops?

 

An interesting developement. Will we see Atom chips everywhere? Would a 16 core atom chip fold well? I can't see it's lack of out-of-order execution being a problem if all it does is fold...

 

When the blue chip organisations are building up commoditised services based on layering the points of entry into manageable chunks with a low footprint, I'd tentatively suggest this is a strategy that might sting both Intel and Microsoft.

 

Yay. 2 steps backwards, one step forwards in server performance.

It might be the catalyst that actually gets stuff coded for multiple threads though if 16, 32, 64 or whatever... single package core servers come into existence.

Imagine what the performance would be like on the Xeon equivalent!

 

I thought atoms were terrible in terms of performance per clock in the laptop market so why would you want to run a many core atom server?

 

I'd rather see a 32 Bobcat core chip.

 

stepping up from 2 to 16 cores is asking a little much, and why would they want atom? brazos has proven to be an effective alternative. if amd ditched the gpu portion of brazos then they easily fit a lot more cores in 1 package. the gpu consumes most of the space of the chip. also, amd is the only company that has actually made a 12 core cpu, so i'm sure their experience would make them a better candidate to make a 16 core.

btw, MS and intel are NOT "old friends". they're both incredibly dependent on each other, and MS has sort of forced intel to do what they wanted in the past.

 

Sounds a bit like a revamp of Larrabee

 

Watching MS and Intel go at it would be about like watching zombies and soldiers fight in HL2. Highly entertaining since you don't care about either side!

 

It looks like Microsoft don't care about what AMD comes up with then

 

they aren't to bad anymore when you have the dual-cores. the speed just seems outdated, like laptop from 5 years ago. I think a 16 core server with an atom-base wouldn't be to bad. It would be pretty efficient in power consumption, and give off very little heat compared to Xeons, PowerPC, etc. For small scale servers it would work quite well.

 

@Cthippo Nicely put Actually I think Intel and ARM don't have to care either. They both have their own field covered. And what might have just happened is that MS asked ARM to port Windows to their architecture with them, and ARM have said "yes" with a number containing $ sign and huge amount of zeros in it. It would be whole lot cheaper to stay x86 exclusive than port the bloated Windows ecosystem to ARM.
I wouldn't be surprised if MS would "press" AMD next.

 

Would it run Crysis?

 

Before M$ starts to ask for more cores, they should first and foremost slim down their OS to run acceptable on the currently available DualCore Atoms.

Install Ubuntu on your Atom 330 and see how good they perform actually.

Besides that... More cores for servers are nothing bad, but out-of-order execution has much more to offer then the sheer amount of cores alone. Look at the Servers that are running on IBM Cell-processors or nVidia GPUs.

 

I dont care if it's a single core, dual, triple, quad or any other multitude of cores, as long as the overall clock frequency stays up to ensure a decent amount of real cpu horsepower.

 

Bit-tech seems to have missed today's big story ...Intel recalling ALL series6 Sandybridge chipsets for laptop and desktop motherboards.

Aaaah ,,,the trials and tribulations of being an early adopter!

 

Absolutely pointless.

Especially as most programs can't really work with 16 seperate threads.

 

@ Elton, did you actually read the article? its for ARM not x86, so a completely different ball field altogether.