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Intel Shows Off 80-core Processor

Journal written by thejakebrain (1106821) and posted by Zonk on Fri Jun 01, 2007 09:03 AM
from the next-up-a-skillion-core-system dept.
Intel Hardware
thejakebrain writes "Intel has built its 80-core processor as part of a research project, but don't expect it on your desktop any time soon. The company's CTO, Justin Rattner, held a demonstration of the chip for a group of reports last week. Intel will be presenting a paper on the project at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week. 'The chip is capable of producing 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, known as a teraflop. That's a level of performance that required 2,500 square feet of large computers a decade ago. Intel first disclosed it had built a prototype 80-core processor during last fall's Intel Developer Forum, when CEO Paul Otellini promised to deliver the chip within five years.'" Update: 06/01 14:37 GMT by Z : This article is about four months old. We discussed this briefly last year, but search didn't show that we discussed in February.
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[+] Intel Pledges 80 Core Processor in 5 Years 439 comments
ZonkerWilliam writes "Intel has developed an 80 core processor with claims 'that can perform a trillion floating point operations per second.'" From the article: "CEO Paul Otellini held up a silicon wafer with the prototype chips before several thousand attendees at the Intel Developer Forum here on Tuesday. The chips are capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second, Otellini said during a keynote speech. The company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window."
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  • But... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Does it run Linux?

  • cue (Score:5, Funny)

    by russ1337 (938915) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:07AM (#19351097)
    Cue the 'needed to run Vista' jokes....
    • Finally I can realize my dream of playing 500 instances of Quake 3 on one machine!

        • Oh, I get it! You spell "Microsoft" with a "$" replacing the "s" because Microsoft likes money! Then you write some shallow technical-sounding drivel around it to legitimize your flagrant adolescent fanboyism as Slashdot's trademark pseudo-intellectual circle-jerk! Clever!
          Karma was meant to be burned, not whored.

  • Older Story (Score:3, Informative)

    by Maddog Batty (112434) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:07AM (#19351105) Homepage
    Older story on this here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/ 26/1937237 [slashdot.org]

    Sure would be nice to have a play with it once they have worked out how to program it...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by timeOday (582209)

      Sure would be nice to have a play with it once they have worked out how to program it...

      It's very likely you can get one at Best Buy before they have worked out how to program with it. The fact is, current programming paradigms simply aren't suited to fine-grained parallelism - and in saying that, I don't mean to imply that such a paradigm can definitely exist. Sure there are many parallel research languages, but whether those could be adopted by mainstream programmers and used to achieve anywhere near

  • IA64 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AvitarX (172628) <me&brandywinehundred,org> on Friday June 01 2007, @09:08AM (#19351119) Journal
    I remember when IA64 was the next huge supercomputer on a chip 5 years off.

    It didn't work out too well for Intel.

    • Re:IA64 (Score:5, Funny)

      by ciroknight (601098) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:21AM (#19351253)
      I remember when Pentium was the next huge chip from Intel that was a few years off.

      I guess we all know how that one turned out.
      • Also Pentium IV - piece of shit, still pretty damned fast, sold like mad. Sometimes Intel's failures are great successes.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by timeOday (582209)
        Itanium is doing ridiculously badly. Intel and HP will never recoup the billions they invested through sales of big iron alone.

  • It may be known as "a teraflop", but... (Score:5, Informative)

    by 91degrees (207121) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:09AM (#19351123) Journal
    It's known incorrectly.

    The measurement is "FLOPS". Floating Point Operations Per Second. It's an acronym. The 'S' is part of the acronym. Hence even if you only have oneof them, it's still a FLOPS. And it's capitalised.

    Strictly speaking it should be "trillion FLOPS" as well since it's not an SI unit but my pedantry is limitted.

  • beowulf cluster? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 01 2007, @09:09AM (#19351127)
    can you imagine.

    • Re:beowulf cluster? (Score:5, Funny)

      by jollyreaper (513215) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:39AM (#19351477)

      beowulf cluster?

      can you imagine.
      Yeah, man. Or what if Intel codenamed their next processor Beowulf? *inhales, holds breath, exhales slowly, smoke twisting lazily* Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulfs or did I just blow your mind?

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by jollyreaper (513215)

          If intel called the 80 cpu beast "Grendel", could it still be part of a Beowulf cluster? Or would it end up in a perpetual battle - cpu versus os - until the very fabric of the universe itself crumbled around us?
          If you could work Grendel's mom into a Beowulf cluster of Grendels, you might just have aced the German pr0n market. For Japan, add tentacles. And if you can reverse the expected subject/verb/object order, you might have a market in Soviet Russia to boot.

  • Deja vu all over again (Score:4, Insightful)

    by $RANDOMLUSER (804576) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:10AM (#19351135)
    "Intel CEO promises to deliver magical new uber processor within five years".

    Stop me if you've heard this one before...

  • Intel used 100 million transistors on the chip, which measures 275 millimeters squared. By comparison, its Core 2 Duo chip uses 291 million transistors and measures 143 millimeters squared.
    Maybe its just because I haven't had my morning coffee yet, or is that a typo?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Andy Dodd (701)
      80 cores means there are probably quite a lot of on-chip interconnects between the cores.

      • 80 cores means there are probably quite a lot of on-chip interconnects between the cores.

        There has to be a typo hiding in there, but the whole thing is an empty set. It's hard to believe they can make 80 cores with 100E6 transistors when it take 261E6 transistors to make two. Each core would have less than a million transistors in the 80 core model. You have to go all the way back to the 486 [answers.com] to see that kind of count from Intel. It's possible because the cores are not x86, there's no "ability to use

    • Re:core 2 duo has a higher transistor density? (Score:4, Informative)

      by imsabbel (611519) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:31AM (#19351349)
      Core2 has 2 or 4 Mbyte l2 cache. 1 bit cache is 6 transitors == more than 200 of those 291 million transistors are high-density cache. (Density of cache is a lot higher than that of logic, which the 80 core cpu nearly solely is made of).

      (Btw, i fucking HATE the "millimeters squared" expression. Its square millimeter. 275 mm squared would be more than 65 cm^2.)

    • It's possible... (Score:4, Informative)

      by mbessey (304651) on Friday June 01 2007, @10:02AM (#19351849) Homepage Journal
      I thought that was a little weird, too. But the 80-core chip could simply have more wires (and therefore, fewer transistors). Given that they mention that there are routing elements between the cores, it's possible that a lot of the chip's real estate is taken up by massive busses between adjacent cores.

      Another explanation might be that they didn't want to waste the time/expense to come up with an optimized layout, or that they intentionally spaced things out to make testing easier.

  • Frak everything, we're doing 80 blades (Score:5, Funny)

    by jollyreaper (513215) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:11AM (#19351143)
    I'm sorry but when I see these competitions I always come back to this Onion piece. A classic.

    http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930 [theonion.com]

    Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades

    By James M. Kilts
    CEO and President,
    The Gillette Company

    Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That's three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades.

    Sure, we could go to four blades next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a thicker aloe strip and call it the Mach3SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!

    You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-blade game. Are they the best a man can get? Fuck, no. Gillette is the best a man can get.

    What part of this don't you understand? If two blades is good, and three blades is better, obviously five blades would make us the best fucking razor that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the razor game by clinging to the two-blade industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, five blades is the biggest chance of all.

    Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more blades in there. I don't care how. Make the blades so thin they're invisible. Put some on the handle. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!

    You're taking the "safety" part of "safety razor" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make razor history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that five blades can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then fuck you. And if you're on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I'm the only one who'll take risks, I'm sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the five-blade razor becomes the shaving tool for the U.S. of "this is how we shave now" A.

    People said we couldn't go to three. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Five's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at Norelco, working on fucking electrics. Rotary blades, my white ass!

    Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Bic's wake and make pens. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Bic is the day I leave the razor game for good, and that won't happen until the day I die!

    The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, shaving with anything less than five blades is like scraping your beard off with a dull hatchet." Or "You'll be so smooth, I could snort lines off of your chin." Try "Your neck is going to be so friggin' soft, someone's gonna walk up and tie a goddamn Cub Scout kerchief under it."

    I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which Gillette is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, five blades, sweet Jesus in heaven.

    • Haha....
      You'll love this then.
      octaginator 8 blades [youtube.com]

      -Reece
      • O RLY?

        Add 2 cores, you get 2x TFlops, add 4 -- get 16x, add 8 you get 256x TFlops. Why stop there, add 80 you get 2^80 = 1208925819614629174706176x more TFlops. Heck, add 1000 cores and you can simulate the universe! Well, I am putting my life's savings into Intel stock!

      • The onion article was about competition, not performance. It was a satiric look at how one company feels pressured to innovate in an arena where continuously adding *features* will not have a significant impact on the performance of the product. You can't simply substitute Intel for Gillette and assume that the remainder of the article would mesh up.

        It was an interesting parody. Perhaps not entirely on topic, but related.

        And it was freakin' hilarious.

  • Not only a dupe... but of an old story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CajunArson (465943) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:13AM (#19351167) Journal
    It must be a really slow news day. From the dateline:

    Published: February 11, 2007

    Not to mention that Slashdot (even Zonk) Covered this LAST YEAR [slashdot.org].
    But that's OK, I'm sure Slashdot gave insightful and cogent coverage of real events that actually matter to geeks on this site, you know, like the Release of a new major version of GCC [gnu.org]
    Oh wait.... that (like a bunch of other actually interesting stories) would be in the aptly-named, sir not appearing on this website category due to it not making enough banner revenue.
    • Clearly, there is a demonstrable need for news sites to process dupes faster and in parallel with other dupes. The reason this one took so long is because there isn't a high-speed dupe instruction on the older generations of processors.

  • Imagine a... (Score:5, Funny)

    by simong (32944) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:14AM (#19351181) Homepage
    oh.

  • AMD's response (Score:4, Insightful)

    by drgonzo59 (747139) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:17AM (#19351201)
    This is a nice move by Intel. I wonder what AMD's plans are...81 cores?

    Besides, with most software being single-threaded I don't know if a consumer will immediately need more than 4 cores for a while. I can still see software companies trying to come up with ways to keep all 80 cores busy..."Well, they need at least 20 anti-virus processes, 10 genuine advantage monitors, and we'll install 100 shareware application with cute little icons in the task bar by default. There, that should keep all the cores nice and warm and busy -- our job is done!".

    But in all seriousness, I would expect some extremely realistic environmental physical simulations (realtime large n-body interactions and perhaps realtime computational fluid dynamics)...now that's something to look forward to!

    • I think one of the possible uses for an 80-core CPU that nobody's really talked about is multiple redundancy. If one core should somehow get fried, you have 79 left.

      • If that's the case, might as well connect all unused heatsinks to a griddle and I'll fry my by bacon and eggs in the morning on them. If some of them burn up or get too hot it's "ok" I got 60 others waiting...

        Or... you could just have two and order a CPU to be delivered when one burns up. In fact that's what happens on some mainframes. If a part fries, the machine calls "home" and the company will send a replacement immediately. Sometimes the administrator will find out something went bad only when the rep

    • AMD's response was buying ATi in order to work on their future chip, "Fusion", which will incorporate somehow a GPU-type accelerator on-die or at least in-package with a traditional x86 CPU.

      GPUs already have "many cores", if you can really call them that; 16 ROPs, 80 texture units, 64 shader cores, etc. Intel's approach is a much simpler architecture (in fact, "too simple" right now, the cores are practically feature-less), but DAAMIT's makes more business-sense (re-use what we've already got vs. invent
      • That makes sense. The GPUs sometimes have a a higher transistor count than CPUs...

        The problem with Fusion is if they kill the add-on graphics and you just buy one Fusion processor that costs say $400 to plug into the CPU slot. In the meantime, NVIDIA releases their new generation board and Intel releases a new generation CPU. The consumer can choose to upgrade one or the other or both, but an AMD customer is stuck just one expensive part and would have to upgrade it as one piece.

        Perhaps in the future th

    • Kilts becomes AMD CEO:

      81 cores? Fuck that! We're going to 100 cores and putting a goddamn window on the CPU so all of the fan boys can watch the electrons flow. Then we're going to put the ethernet connection DIRECTLY on the chip. Ya, you heard me right, a connector right on the damn chip. You disagree? Great, I need your soon to be empty cube to store my prototypes you pussy.

      Wait! Brace yourself, I've got another one. A speaker slapped onto the CPU. You hear that? That is the sound of genius and

  • Ob (Score:2, Funny)

    by rlp (11898)
    In Soviet Russia, Intel's 80 core processor imagines a Beowolf cluster of you!

  • For the love of god... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tomstdenis (446163) <tomstdenis@@@gmail...com> on Friday June 01 2007, @09:34AM (#19351409) Homepage
    and all that is holy on this sacred Earth ...

    This isn't a general purpose processor. Think "cell processor" on a larger scale. You wouldn't be running your firefox or text editor on this thing. You'd load it up and have it do things like graphics processing, ray tracing, DSP work, chemical analysis, etc...

    So stop saying "we already don't have multi-core software now!!!" because this isn't meant for most software anyways.

    Tom

    • Re:For the love of god... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ciroknight (601098) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:44AM (#19351561)
      "This isn't a general purpose processor."

      ...Yet. You're right in the fact that these cores are incredibly simplistic, so much so that they make DSPs look functional, but really what's going on here is a science project to develop the on-chip network, not to develop the CPU cores as much. Intel envisions lifting the networking component out of this design and applying it to various different cores, so that a general computing core can be mixed in with DSP cores and other "Application Specific Accelerator" cores.

      So no, this model you're not going to be running Firefox or your text editor on (in fact, I doubt you even _could_ do this, these cores currently are very, very stripped down in their capacity to do work, to where they're basically two MACs tied to a small SRAM and a "network adapter"), but never-say-never, this style of chip is right around the corner.

  • Not usefull yet.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CockroachMan (1104387) on Friday June 01 2007, @09:39AM (#19351471)
    It's useless to keep putting more cores into a processor when we still don't have a decent parallel programming paradigm.

    80 cores is an absurd number, with the parallelism level that we have in today programs, most of the cores should be idle most of the time.
    • I really don't understand this idea that we "can't use multiple cores yet" because we don't have some magical, mythical necessary programming model that will make this come alive instantly. The fact is, we've had the necessary models for decades now. Adding multiple cores doesn't necessarily mean we need to change our programs at all, but rather it means we need to change our Operating Systems.

      To the point: right now, we typically schedule applications to run on time-slices, to virtually expand one proce
  • A transputer [wikipedia.org] which was around in the 80s?

    Hmm has it really taken 20 years of research or ... Wonders... 20 years later... Patents...?

     
  • Well, those shitty, basic computers that took up big rooms, remember those? No? Ok, well, if those were still here, this thing would be like 90239820 times smaller, cool huh? How many of those are we going to have to hear before we come up with some new kind of comparison. You know how fast a woman can plot a route around a detour using a map in a big city? Yeah? Well, this shit is like 939203902093902093092093 times faster.

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