Intel Shows Off 80-core Processor

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.

Older Story

[Maddog Batty]

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...

It may be known as "a teraflop", but...

[91degrees]

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.

Re:core 2 duo has a higher transistor density?

[imsabbel]

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...

[mbessey]

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.

transistor density?

[twitter]

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 memory" and ... it's vapor ware. For the practical significance, they might as well have photographed a box of Pentiums and called it useful because Open Mosix does auto clustering and there are live CD versions. You've got a better chance of computing something with the box of Pentiums.

Bus space is not likely to be an issue either. It does not show up in this image of the cell processor. [anandtech.com]

Re:IA64

[timeOday]

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