Intel puts cloud on single megachip

actual computing speed

it's clearly labelled a research project but I'd like to know what it's best current performance is. They say the cores are simplified to in-order instruction issue and probably fewer instruction dispatches (wiki says atom can do 2 issues per core, I'll bet top end processors can do 3 or more) so that's a significant constant slice taken off, then there's undoubtedly smaller caches (can't find spec for this) which will be significant hit, depending on workload of course, and clock speed is also unspecified, probably for good reason. And from their press release "Application software can use this network to quickly pass information directly between cooperating cores in a matter of a few microseconds..." a few microseconds??? ouch!

My guess is that performance can be estimated from the power output and separately, number of transistors. 125 watts corresponds to a decent modern quad-core IIRC, and the number of trannies in my dual core is ~300 million, so I'd guess real world performance is equivalent to a decent spec quad core, very roughly. So while it's a laudable and very valuable piece of research, I doubt it's the rocket they're implying.

@Louis Savain: back again, troll?

Surely you mean...

"and the path the company is treading is many-cored."

Surely you mean "magny-cours"...

Is this where the money went?

"..the compute-intensive Black-Scholes financial modeling app,.."

This is just a renaming of the 'Black-Hole' financial management system that banks have been operating for the past few years. If it gets automated, we can go into recession faster and more effectively.

How much?

Seriously, anybody have an idea as to how much it would cost a company such as Intel to prototype a new chip in this way? Apart from the raw material costs and design costs, is it expensive these days to produce a single wafer of a custom design or is it something that is now relatively cheap?

Just curious really...

any resemblance to any existing processor is purely coincidental

40 cores on single die. i know where i've seen it before: S40 from IntellaSys (http://colorforth.com/S40.htm) and coming GA40 (http://colorforth.com/GA.htm).

granted, they're not IA-compatible (probably a Good Thing), so far are programmed in forth only and draw all of 9mW per core at full speed thanks to being vastly simpler than anything intel does. luckily they aim for different niche.

@BlueGreen

"My guess is that performance can be estimated from the power output and separately, number of transistors. 125 watts corresponds to a decent modern quad-core IIRC, and the number of trannies in my dual core is ~300 million, so I'd guess real world performance is equivalent to a decent spec quad core, very roughly. So while it's a laudable and very valuable piece of research, I doubt it's the rocket they're implying."

"Guessing" that throughput can be estimated from power output is exactly that - guessing. Firstly, power consumption is distinctly non-linear with increasing clock speed. As Intel found out, ramping up clock speeds to ever higher levels gets diminishing returns and a catastrophic reduction in energy efficiency. It's well known, that if you back off the clock speed perhaps 20% you can double the number of cores for the same power consumption. Single thread speed isn't as good, but total throughput (with the right software) is much higher. That's without the fact that Intel have been making great strides on power efficiency in other areas beside just dropping clock speeds. Throughput per watt has increased enormously over the last few years, and as a new chip, then I'd expect this one to have gained some benefit.

Now there are big issues with the scaling of a 48 core chip, especially if it supports single consistent memory models. There are huge issues of memory bandwidth and maintaining cache coherence (given that the article alludes to cloud computing in a chip, then it's very likely that it is not anticipated that it will be used with as single consistent memory model across all the cores).

Going back to the article, the impression given is that, somehow, truly intelligent machines will emerge through ever higher throughput processors. I think that's a nonsense - I've seen 25 years of work in the AI field, and precious little has come of it in terms of "true" intelligence. We have expert systems, writing, speech recognition and language translations and so on, but none of those come remotely close to what a human being can do, or the way that the brain works. It's going to take a fundamental breakthrough in the area of cognitive science before that is cracked (and I see little sign of it) and I don't think it is going to come just through faster CPUs owing their fundamental architecture to Von Neumann founded on logic.

Re: actual computing speed

"clock speed is also unspecified, probably for good reason"

I noticed that too, but bear in mind that single-core performance is currently achieved by tweaking absolutely everything as far as it will go, to the extent that the limit is set by heat dissipation. If you are willing to accept (say) half the per-core performance, the per-core power consumption drops by an order of magnitude.

And the programming model is going to be easier than GPGPUs, and reputable folks are already using the latter. According to the presentation, Intel already have Linux running on this chip. Can any of the GPU vendors make the same claim?

This chip could well be the commercial compromise that finally proves Sun were on the right track with Niagara.

Core blimey

The will see, and they will hear, they will probablly speak, and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities.

One word: storage.

So this processor will be small and able to pretend to be a human, but will be shaped like a 40-foot lorry!

@DeepThought

Congratulations on breaking the first rule of posting statements on the Internet. That rule is to always check your facts. Permute is not a new word - it's a verb meaning to change order or subject to permutation.

@Mr Jolly

Totally agree with you, although I have actually patented that very idea you think you had first with the jam jar and Cat5 cable. I have already marketed it under the name "Exospheric Networking Device".

The Exospheric being the top notch, and price is related to that, the second model which is two yoghurt pots joined by a piece of string of length according to need, and named the Stratospheric is priced accordingly.

Only FTSE 100 companies can really afford these models, so I'm a bit loathe to provide full technical details here.

@ac performance of cores

"More cores is good, BUT you have to increase the performance of cores vs. current cores"

So seem to be saying that the performance of the individual cores in a multi-processor design is less than the performance of a single core.

There's no real reason why this should be the case. If you're talking about a multi-core from one technology and comparing it to another technology ( different feature size, different architecture, different vendor) then yes, peformance will be different, you're not comparing like with like. But that's a statement which is true for single processor chips too.

But if the core in a single chip is integrated with others to create a multi-core solution on a single die, then there should not be a performance degredation.

There might be an issue with heat dissipation with mutiple cores which could lead to a reduction in the clock frequency, but that's tough, you have to live with that.

I'm not really sure what you're getting at.

To say, contrast a muti-core Cell processor with a single or multi-core intel processor would be an invalid and somewhat silly comparison.

Even on a multi-core design, the engineers are going to push the technology, run the thing as fast as possible, why wouldn't they? (unless you're specifically going for a lower power design to avoid using forced air cooling).

Performance of Single Core Vs. Multicore

The idea that a single processor is faster than the individiual cores in a multi-core chip isn't really going to be an issue, it shouldn't be in most applications.

A single processor is blindingly fast these days, compared to days of old.Most applications don't require this level of performance, except games.

Step into the arena a multi-core chip, where each core is lower in clock frequency, where the architecture of each core in the multi-core chip is the same architecture as the single core chip. Many applications can naturally be structured to use multiple processes running concurrently, and so can be implemented on multi-cores.

Sure, existing applications will need to be re-designed perhaps, but new applications can be partitioned in terms of their functionality to benefit from multi-cores, with the net result being they will run faster than if if they were implemented using a higher clock frequency single core.

So, I don't hold weight in the argument that single cores are faster. They are only faster because software is currently developed to be fastest on them. Applications developed for multi-cores will be faster than the single core solution.

Quick comparison

The Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition has 731 million transistors and 4 cores, which boils down to 183 million transistors per core.

This baby has 1.3 billion transistors and 48 cores, which means a hairs' more than 27 million per core. That kind of count throws us back to AMD K7 territory (1999).

Just a thought.

Human or dancer?

"The machines we build will be capable of understanding the world around them much as we do as humans."

Any computer that doesn't feel satisfaction after having a good shit isn't much like a human.

Re: Quick comparison

"[...] a hairs' more than 27 million per core. That kind of count throws us back to AMD K7 territory (1999)."

Yeah, so? Over the same period, the clock speed of the chip has increased by about 20-fold and the supporting memory chips having perhaps doubled. That would have given a 10-fold *drop* in the number of instructions dispatched per clock, had we not spent all those transistors in various ways to keep useful work being done in the absence of hard data. This new chip probably benefits from *most* of the increase in basic switching speed, but takes a very different approach to keeping useful work being done. It's a proven approach (especially for server or gaming workloads, but hardly restricted to those) and almost certainly more scalable.

@ToddRundgren

Re: Are you sure the xbox 360 is a Power box?

Yes. Xbox 360 has a custom IBM PowerPC 3 core, dual thread, CPU design (something not wiki: http://hardware.teamxbox.com/articles/xbox/1144/The-Xbox-360-System-Specifications/p1).

Xbox 1 (the original) had some P3 / celeron half-breed thing from Intel (http://hankfiles.pcvsconsole.com/answer.php?file=135).

@Buzzby

I can't beleive we got this far down the page before the similarities of that picture to the broken CPU from the Terminator classic were raised.

Looks like nothing less than the dawn of total mechanical domination to me.