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Hardware

Tilera To Release 100-Core Processor 191

angry tapir writes "Tilera has announced new general-purpose CPUs, including a 100-core chip. The two-year-old startup's Tile-GX series of chips are targeted at servers and appliances that execute Web-related functions such as indexing, Web search and video search. The Gx100 100-core chip will draw close to 55 watts of power at maximum performance."
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Tilera To Release 100-Core Processor

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  • This is great ! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ls671 ( 1122017 ) * on Monday October 26, 2009 @03:27AM (#29870063) Homepage

    I can't wait to see the output of :

    cat /proc/cpuinfo

    I guess we will need to use:

    cat /proc/cpuinfo | less

    When we reach 1 million cores, we will need to rearrange the output of cat /proc/cpuinfo to eliminate redundant information ;-))

    By the way I just typed "make menuconfig" and it wiil let you enter a number up to 512 in the "Maximum number of CPUs" field, so the Linux kernel seems ready for up to 512 CPUs (or cores, they are handled the same way by Linux it seems) as far I can tell by this simple test. Entering a number greater than 512 gives the "You have made an invalid entry" message ;-(

    Note: You need to turn on "Support for big SMP systems with more than 8 CPUs" flag as well.

     

    • obligatory (Score:2, Funny)

      by wisty ( 1335733 )

      ... and just imagine a Beowulf cluster of them.

    • Re:This is great ! (Score:5, Informative)

      by MrMr ( 219533 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @03:42AM (#29870135)
      The 'stock' kernel is ready for 512 cpu's. SGI had a 2048-core single image Linux kernel six years ago.
      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by mrops ( 927562 )

        But the more important question is...

        Will it run Windows 7.

        I know, I know, its the wrong questions, but the answer to the other one is always "yes".

    • Re:This is great ! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BadAnalogyGuy ( 945258 ) <BadAnalogyGuy@gmail.com> on Monday October 26, 2009 @03:46AM (#29870149)

      By the way I just typed "make menuconfig" and it wiil let you enter a number up to 512 in the "Maximum number of CPUs" field, so the Linux kernel seems ready for up to 512 CPUs (or cores, they are handled the same way by Linux it seems) as far I can tell by this simple test. Entering a number greater than 512 gives the "You have made an invalid entry" message

      Whoa. If you change the source a little, you can enter 1000000 into the Maximum number of CPUs field! Linux is ready for up to a million cores.

      If you change the code a little more, when I enter a number that's too high for menuconfig, it says "We're not talking about your penis size, Holmes"

      • by Trepidity ( 597 )

        And if you change the code a little more, it takes single-threaded tasks and automatically finds an efficient parallelization of them, distributing the work out to those million cores!

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by am 2k ( 217885 )

          Actually, some algorithms (like fluid simulation and a very large neural net) are not that hard to parallelize to run on a million cores.

          • by Trepidity ( 597 )

            Yes, but taking an arbitrary single-threaded algorithm and automatically figuring out what the parallelization is is the hard part. =]

            • by am 2k ( 217885 )

              Well, you could analyze the data dependencies and put them into a dependency graph, and then figure out what can be parallelized without having too much synchronization overhead. However, that's probably something for a theoretical scientific paper, and I'd be surprised if you could paralellize most algorithms to split to more threads than you could count on one hand...

              As soon as you're doing linear I/O (like network access), you've hit a barrier anyways.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by dkf ( 304284 )

            Actually, some algorithms (like fluid simulation and a very large neural net) are not that hard to parallelize to run on a million cores.

            Building the memory backplane and communication system (assuming you're going for a cluster) to support a million CPUs is non-trivial. Without those, you'll go faster with fewer CPUs. That's why supercomputers are expensive (it's not in the processors, but in the rest of the infrastructure to support them).

            • Yep (Score:5, Informative)

              by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @07:14AM (#29870989)

              Unfortunately these days the meaning of supercomputer gets a bit diluted by many people calling clusters "supercomputers". They aren't really. As you noted what makes a supercomputer "super" isn't the number of processors, it is the rest, in particular the interconnects. Were this not the case, you could simply use cheaper clusters.

              So why does it matter? Well, certain kinds of problems can't be solved by a cluster, just as certain ones can. To help understand how that might work, take something more people are familiar with like the difference between a cluster and just a bunch of computers on the Internet.

              Some problems are extremely bandwidth non-intensive. They don't need no inter-node communication, and very little communication with the head node. A good example would be the Mersenne Prime Search, or Distributed.net. The problem is extremely small, the structure of the program is larger than the data itself. All the head node has to do is hand out ranges for clients to work on, and the clients only need to report the results, affirmative or negative. As such, it is something suited to work over the Internet. The nodes can be low bandwidth, they can drop out of communication for periods of time and it all works fine. Running on a cluster would gain you no speed over the same group of computers on modems.

              However the same is not true for video rendering. You have a series of movie files you wish to composite in to a final production, with effects and so on. This sort of work is suited to a cluster. While the nodes can work independent, the work of one node doesn't depend on the others, they do require a lot of communication with the head node. The problem is very large, the video data can be terabytes. The result is also not small. So you can do it on many computers, but the bandwidth needs to be pretty high, with low latency. Gigabit Ethernet is likely what you are looking at. Trying to do it over the Internet, even broadband, would waste more time in data transfer than you'd gain in processing. You need a cluster.

              Ok well supercomputers are the next level of that. What happens when you have a problem where you DO have a lot of inter-node communication? The result of the calculations on one node are influenced by the results on all others. This happens in things like physics simulations. In this case, a cluster can't handle it. You can slam your bandwidth but worse, you have too much latency. You spend all your time waiting on data, and thus computation speed isn't any faster.

              For that, you need a supercomputer. You need something where nodes can directly access the memory of other nodes. It isn't quite as fast as local memory access, but nearly. Basically you want them to play like they are all the same physical system.

              That's what separates a true supercomputer for a big cluster. You can have lots of CPUs and that's wonderful, there are a lot of problems you can solve on that. However that isn't a supercomputer unless the communication between nodes is there.

              • by ja ( 14684 )
                Identifying a "supercomputer" is easy: If you can plug it in - it ain't! And if you do anyway, the +100kW power drain will instantly make you wish you hadn't.
              • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                by afidel ( 530433 )
                10Gb ethernet is fairly low latency and obviously has plenty of bandwidth, using remoteDMA you can get pretty damn good results. Obviously if latency is your #1 performance blocker then it's not going to produce the fastest results, but you can still get good results out of a fairly inexpensive cluster using 10Gb fat trees for most workloads. Basically commodity computing technology has shrunk the gap between what can be done on a moderate sized commodity cluster and what can be done on a purpose built supe
        • by asaul ( 98023 )

          How many cores does it take to run a parallel algorithm?

          100 - 1 to do the processing, 1 to fetch the data and 98 to calculate an efficient way to make the whole thing run in parallel.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by tomhath ( 637240 )

        Whoa. If you change the source a little, you can enter 1000000 into the Maximum number of CPUs field! Linux is ready for up to a million cores.

        640K cores is more than anyone will ever need.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by jellomizer ( 103300 )

          No you really need 16,711,680 cores. So you have one core for every cell in a standard Excel 2003 sheet (Yea I know 2007 finally gave us more space)

          So 65,536 rows by 255 columns. A CPU for each sell processing its own value. Excel may almost run fast.

           

    • Re:This is great ! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert@@@slashdot...firenzee...com> on Monday October 26, 2009 @05:13AM (#29870535) Homepage

      The information in cpuinfo is only redundant like that on x86/amd64...
      On Sparc or Alpha, you get a single block of text where one of the fields means "number of cpus", example:

      cpu : TI UltraSparc IIi (Sabre)
      fpu : UltraSparc IIi integrated FPU
      prom : OBP 3.10.25 2000/01/17 21:26
      type : sun4u
      ncpus probed : 1
      ncpus active : 1
      D$ parity tl1 : 0
      I$ parity tl1 : 0
      Cpu0Bogo : 880.38
      Cpu0ClkTck : 000000001a3a4eab
      MMU Type : Spitfire

      number of cpus active and number of cpus probed (includes any which are inactive)... a million cpus wouldn't present a problem here.

      • Re:This is great ! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @07:11AM (#29870975) Journal
        And this is one of the reasons why Linux is such a pain to program for. If you actually want any of this information from a program, you need to parse /proc/cpuinfo. Unfortunately, every architecture decides to format this file differently, so porting from Linux/x86 to Linux/PowerPC or Linux/ARM requires you to rewrite this parser. Contrast this with *BSD, where the same information is available in sysctls, so you just fire off the one that you want (three lines of code), don't need a parser, and can use the same code on all supported architectures. For fun, try writing code that will get the current power status or number and speed of the CPUs. I've done that, and the total code for supporting NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Solaris on all of their supported architectures was less than the code for supporting Linux/x86 (and doesn't work on Linux/PowerPC).
        • by jefu ( 53450 )

          Good point. But since it wouldn't be hard to add this to /sys, (and I see some of that info already there) I suspect that nobody has really needed it in that format yet. Also, if you're going to get more than a couple pieces of that, /proc/cpuinfo has it nicely in one place and is far from hard to parse.

          • /proc/cpuinfo has it nicely in one place and is far from hard to parse

            ... on x86. Now port your code to PowerPC. Oh, sorry, different format, fields have different names. Write a new parser. Now port it to ARM. Oh, sorry, different format, fields have different names, some of the information isn't there. Now try porting it to SPARC, oh, sorry, can't be bothered supporting Linux, waste of developer time.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by san ( 6716 )

          Take a look at /sys/devices/system/cpu: it has information about cpu topology, cpu hot-swap, cache sizes and layout across cores, current power state, etc.

          It's all there, in an architecture-independent way in /sys/devices.

    • by 1s44c ( 552956 )

      cat /proc/cpuinfo | less

      That gets modded interesting these days? The use of a pipe?

      If that's not too basic to be considered interesting then moderators have got a odd idea about what interesting actually means.

      • Pipes: Not just for hitting any more.
      • It's interesting that even in 2009 on a site for geeks, many people seem not to know about cat abuse and would still rather spawn two processes to do the job of one.
        • because in 2009 CPU power and memory are cheaper than dirt. or didn't you notice we're discussing a 100-core CPU ?

          with capacities like that, even firing MS word to edit a plain text file, instead of notepad, is not too costly anymore... and no, i won't apologize, say i was kidding or any other shenanigans. i really mean it.

          • And then when you use this same pattern in a concurrent find operation, and you end up with 2,000 processes running instead of 1,000, and each read operation being turned into a read, copy, write, read, sequence (which is what happens if you use cat like this), then it's still a good idea?

            No matter how fast computers become, a complex and slow solution to a problem is never better than a simple and slow one. At the very least, typing 'cat /proc/cpuinfo | less' takes more time than typing 'less /proc/cpuin

        • by Sancho ( 17056 )

          I think that "Useless Use of cat" is funny. I really do. I go back and read it every once in a while just for grins.

          But we're in the future, now. Spawning that extra process isn't going to hurt anything. Yeah, it's fun to poke at people who do silly things like that, but in reality, there's rarely harm in doing things this way. Even if you're using a shell script which will run "cat file | grep" over and over, you're probably not going to start thrashing on a modern CPU.

          • First, and importantly, it is more to type. Getting into the habit of doing more work than you need to is never a good idea.

            Secondly, it is a much bigger overhead than you might think. With 'less {file}' the less process just reads the data directly. The kernel copies it out of the VM cache and into the process's buffer. Sometimes it doesn't even do that. Both less and grep will sometimes use mmap(). In that case, the kernel just updates the page tables and the data is never copied, it's just DMA'd f

            • by Sancho ( 17056 )

              It's not less to type once you've already typed "cat /proc/cpuinfo" and then realized -- dangit, I have to paginate that."

              Basically, your post is equivalent to advocating writing your own bubblesort implementation, because it's fast enough on small data sets with modern processors, rather than using the system-provided quicksort function. It's a bad habit, and the fact that it isn't too bad in certain situations doesn't mean it's something that should be encouraged.

              It's like using system-implemented bubblesort over system-implemented quicksort because you're using to typing bubblesort. When you realize that you actually need something faster, you can switch. You're advocating Premature Optimization [wikipedia.org], which Knuth warns against.

              • Choosing good algorithms is not premature optimization. It is only premature if the optimisation comes at the expense of readability or maintainability. Picking a complex and slow solution when there is a simple and fast solution is never the right thing to do. Choosing not to intentionally do the wrong thing is not optimisation, it is good practice.
    • by glgraca ( 105308 )

      When we reach 1 million cores, we'll probably be able to ask the computer what's on his mind...

  • Yes, I suppose technically any FPGA could be considered a "core" in its own right, but it's a far cry from the CPU cores that you typically associate with the term.

    Putting a stock on a semi-automatic rifle makes it an "assault weapon", but c'mon. It's still a pea shooter.

  • by LaurensVH ( 1079801 ) <[eb.hvsnerual] [ta] [hvl]> on Monday October 26, 2009 @03:36AM (#29870107)
    It appears from the article that it's a new, separate architecture to which the kernel hasn't been ported yet, so these are add-on processors that can help reduce the load on the actual CPU, at least for now. So, em, two things: 1. How exactly does that work without kernel level support? They claimed having ported separate apps (MySQL, memcached, Apache), so this might suggest a generic kernel interface and userspace scheduling. 2. How does this fix the apps they ported being mostly IO bound in a lot of cases and 99% of the cores will still just be eating out of their noses?
    • by broken_chaos ( 1188549 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @03:40AM (#29870125)

      How does this fix the apps they ported being mostly IO bound in a lot of cases and 99% of the cores will still just be eating out of their noses?

      Loads and loads of RAM/cache, possibly?

    • by drspliff ( 652992 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @06:40AM (#29870823)

      The Register [channelregister.co.uk] goes into more detail than this article, as usal.

      The Tile-Gx chips will run the Linux 2.6.26 kernel and add-on components that make it an operating system. Apache, PHP, and MySQL are being ported to the chips, and the programming tools will include the latest GCC compiler set. (Three years ago, Tilera had licensed SGI's MIPS-based C/C++ compilers for the Tile chips, which is why I think Tilera has also licensed some MIPS intellectual property to create its chip design, but the company has not discussed this.)

      So it seems pretty standard and they're using existing open & closed source MIPS toolchains, however there's still "will" and "are being" in that sentence which brings a little unease...

  • Custom ISA? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Henriok ( 6762 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @03:37AM (#29870111)
    Massive amounts or cores are cool and all that, but if the instruction set isn't any standard type (ie x86, Sparc, ARM, PowerPC or MIPS) chances are that it won't see light outside highly customized applications. Sure, Linux will probably run it. Linux run on anything, but it won't be put in a regular computer other than as an accelerator of some sort, like GPUs which are massively multicore too. Intel's Larrabee though..
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      In general, new instruction sets are mostly interesting in the custom software and the open source software areas. But the latter is quite a large chunk of the server market, so I suppose they could live with that.

      They would need to get support into gcc first, though.

    • Re:Custom ISA? (Score:5, Informative)

      by stiggle ( 649614 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @04:12AM (#29870265)

      From a quick Google - its based on the ARM core (easily licensable cpu core)

      • by bertok ( 226922 )

        From a quick Google - its based on the ARM core (easily licensable cpu core)

        Must be a coincidence, but I was just thinking a week ago why nobody's tried to make a many-core CPU by doing a cookie-cutter job and just replicating a simple ARM core a bunch of times... looks like someone has!

      • Re:Custom ISA? (Score:5, Informative)

        by ForeverFaithless ( 894809 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @04:51AM (#29870447) Homepage
        Wikipedia claims [wikipedia.org] it's a MIPS-derived VLIW instruction set.
        • by taniwha ( 70410 )

          64-bit VLIW instructions, 2 ALUs, 1 load store unit (3 ops/clock) I'm going to guess 32 registers (ala MIPS) - that means 3+3+2=8x(log2 32 = 5) = 40 bits to encode registers 8+8+8 to encode opcodes which seems maybe too many - perhaps 64 registers 48 bits of regs and 16 of opcodes?

          no FPU though sadly

        • That's a coincidence, I was thinking that when you get to that may cores, you're effectively producing something akin to a VLIW processor, with each instruction handed to its own execution system.

        • by slew ( 2918 )

          The company [tilera.com] website claims...

          64-bit VLIW processors with 64-bit instruction bundle
          3-deep pipeline with up to 3 instructions per cycle

          I don't know how this could be considered ARM or MIPS-derived...

          A better description might have been in this article [linuxfordevices.com]...

          The Tile64 is based on a proprietary VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture, on which a MIPS-like RISC architecture is implemented in microcode. A hypervisor enables each core to run its own instance of Linux, or alternatively the whole

      • by Locutus ( 9039 )
        good one. I browsed the article for what arch it was and was expecting ARM but didn't see it stated. ARM makes sense and the 40nm process has me wondering if it's Cortex a5 or a9 based.

        how about those in some netbooks and a beowulf cluster of those? ;-)

        LoB
      • Re:Custom ISA? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Narishma ( 822073 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @06:52AM (#29870879)

        Why was this modded Informative? Can we have any links? Because both the article here as well as Wikipedia and an old Ars Technica story claim that it's based on MIPS.

    • Re:Custom ISA? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by complete loony ( 663508 ) <Jeremy@Lakeman.gmail@com> on Monday October 26, 2009 @04:20AM (#29870297)

      1. LLVM backend
      2. Grand central
      3. ???
      4. Done.

      Seriously though, this is exactly what Apple have been working towards recently in the compiler space. You write your application and explicitly break up the algorythm into little tasks that can be executed in parallel. Using a syntax that is light weight and expressive. Then your compiler tool chain and runtime JIT manages the runtime threads and determines which processor is best equipped to run each task. It might run on the normal CPU, or it might run on the graphics card.

      • FreeBSD and GCD (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MacTechnic ( 40042 )

        Although I don't expect Apple to release an Apple Server edition with a Tilera multicore processor, I would be interested to see a version of FreeBSD running with Grand Central Dispatch on a Tilera multicore chip. It would give a good idea of how effective GCD would be in allocating cores for execution. Any machine with 100 cores must have a considerable amount of RAM, perhap 8GB+, even with large caches.

        Apple has been very active in developing LLVM compilers, and has recently added CLANG front end, inste

        • Grand Central is nice and buzzwordy, but it's still based on threads and shared memory, so it works best when you have shared cache, or you will end up wasting a lot of time with cache coherency protocols. Erlang or OpenCL are much better fits for this kind of architecture.

          Oh, and the version of clang that Apple ships as 1.0 is a branch from the main tree from a few weeks before the official 1.0 release was branched. Apple puts a lot of developer effort into clang, but so do other people (including myse

      • by Nursie ( 632944 )

        "Seriously though, this is exactly what Apple have been working towards recently in the compiler space. You write your application and explicitly break up the algorythm into little tasks that can be executed in parallel. Using a syntax that is light weight and expressive. Then your compiler tool chain and runtime JIT manages the runtime threads and determines which processor is best equipped to run each task."

        AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!! It's the iPod all over again! Apple did not invent the thread pool! I'm sure Gran

        • No it wasn't that new. But what is new is a common low level language representation that can be optimised in that form before being targetted to the different archetectures that are present in the same machine. It also helps that there is a single machine level daemon managing the tasks that run on those threads.
          • by Nursie ( 632944 )

            Oh I'm not saying it's not innovative, I'm not saying they don't (or didn't) do good, interesting and cutting edge research, it just annoys me that some folks think that they invented the thread pool/job queue model.

    • "...if the instruction set isn't any standard type..."

      No problem; use the processor for a 'speak and spell'-type toy, a drug store reusable digital camera or a scientific calculator and someone will hack a decent Linux kernel onto it over a weekend.

    • by rbanffy ( 584143 )

      They have a C compiler. That's all we need.

  • 100? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nmg196 ( 184961 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @04:10AM (#29870247)

    Wouldn't it have been better to make it a power of 2? Some work is more easily divided when you can just keep halving it. 64 or 128 would have been more logical I would have thought. I'm not an SMP programmer thought, so perhaps it doesn't make any difference.

    • Re:100? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Fotograf ( 1515543 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @04:17AM (#29870289) Homepage
      it does if you are carefully starting applications in power of two and designing your applications to use power of two threads.
      • Wish I had mod points today. I wonder how many people will get just how funny this fantastically sarcastic and totally on target comment was. Bravo.

    • Re:100? (Score:5, Informative)

      by harry666t ( 1062422 ) <harry666t@@@gmail...com> on Monday October 26, 2009 @04:28AM (#29870327)

      SMP FAQ.

      Q: Does the number of processors in a SMP system need to be a power of two/divisible by two?

      A: No.

      Q: Does the number of processors in a SMP system...

      A: Any number of CPUs/cores that is larger than one will make the system an SMP system*.

      (* except when it's an asymmetrical architecture)

      Q: How do these patterns (power of 2, divisible by 2, etc) of numbers of cores affect performance?

      A: Performance depends on the architecture of the system. You cannot judge by simply looking at the number of cores, just as you can't simply look at MHz.

    • Re:100? (Score:5, Funny)

      by glwtta ( 532858 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @05:29AM (#29870573) Homepage
      Their plan is to eventually confuse consumers by advertising "X KiloCores! (* KC = 1000 cores)" when everyone expects a KiloCore to be 1024 cores.
    • It doesn't need to be a power of two, but being a square number helps for this kind of design because you want a regular arrangement that can fit into a regular grid on the die.
  • Sounds like something that might be useful in a video game console ...
  • Are these x86/x86-64 CPUs? It wasn't particularly clear to me.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26, 2009 @05:56AM (#29870661)

    OK, so big disclaimer: I work for Sun (not Oracle, yet!)

    The Sun Niagara T1 chip came out over 3 years ago, and it did 32 threads on 8 cores.
    And drew something around 50W (200W for a fully-loaded server). And under $4k.

    The T2 systems came out last year, do 64 threads/CPU for a similar power budget. And even less $/thread.

    The T3 systems likely will be out next year (I don't know specifically when, I'm not In The Know), and the threads/chip should double again, with little power increase.

    Of course, per-thread performance isn't equal to anything like a modern "standard" CPU. Though, it's now "good enough" for most stuff - the T2 systems have a per-thread performance equal to about the old Pentium3 chips. I would be flabbergasted if this GX chip had a per-core performance anywhere near that.

    I'm not sure how Intel's Larabee is going to show (it's still nowhere near release), but the T-seres chips from Sun are cheap, open, and available now. And they run Solaris AND Linux. So unless this new GX chip is radically more efficient/higher-performance/less costly, I don't see this company making any impact.

    -Erik

  • It would be clever (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rbanffy ( 584143 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @06:22AM (#29870763) Homepage Journal

    Since a) developing a processor is insanely expensive and b) they need it to run lots of software ASAP, it would be very clever if they spent a marginal part of the overall development costs in making sure every key Linux and *BSD kernel developer gets some hardware they can use to port the stuff over. Make it a nice desktop workstation with cool graphics and it will happen even faster.

    They are going up against Intel... The traditional approach (delivering a faster processor with a better power consumption at a lower price) simply will not work here.

    I think Movidis taught us a lesson a couple years back. Users will not move away from x86 for anything less than a spectacular improvement. Even the Niagara SPARC servers are a hard sell these days...

  • The two-year-old startup's Tile-GX series of chips are targeted at servers and appliances that execute Web-related functions such as indexing, Web search and video search.

    Can someone explain to me how a chip can be targetted at much higher-level tasks like these?

    I realize there are surely technical means to achieve this goal, I just can't imagine myself what these means could be.

    • There is not really such a thing as a general purpose CPU. Any CPU with a few features (add, conditional branch) can run any algorithm, but can't necessarily run it fast. Different applications have different instruction mixes. The kind of code that GPUs are designed to run, for example, places very high demands on memory throughput and floating point performance, but is relatively sparse in terms of branches and integer operations. On average, most programs have a branch every 7 instructions, but GPU c
    • by Skapare ( 16644 )

      An associative memory requirement could be better served by a custom high-core count, CPU ... if it has sufficient memory on board (e.g. sufficient total memory bus bandwidth).

  • hmm... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Skizmo ( 957780 )
    100 cores... that means that my cpu will never go beyond '1% busy'
    • by igny ( 716218 )
      Just install the Core BotNet and configure it to execute DDoS to the Windows threads.
  • Clojure is a lisp on the JVM designed for multi-threading. From:
    http://clojure.org/ [clojure.org]
    """
    Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine (and the CLR ). It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @08:33AM (#29871589)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • For some reason, I read this article and immediately thought about a 15-bladed hsaving razor... My point being that 100 cores, while it sounds impressive, you get a diminished return after a few cores. Even if software was written for multi-core use (and not enough of it is, IMO), you still can't possibly, effectively, use 100 cores...not before this processor is already extinct due to technological progress. Even my quad core Intel CPU, hardly uses all 4 cores...and most commonly hits CPU1 for processes.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cpghost ( 719344 )

      My point being that 100 cores, while it sounds impressive, you get a diminished return after a few cores.

      Yes, indeed. The memory bus is usually the bottleneck here... unless you switch from SMP to NUMA architecture, which seems necessary for anything with more than, say, 8 to 16 cores.

  • asymmetric (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @09:49AM (#29872491) Homepage

    It's been reported that these cores will be relatively underpowered, though both the total processing power and cost per watt will be quite impressive. This makes the chip appropriate for putting in a server but not so much a desktop machine, where CPU-intensive single-threads may bog things down.

    So what about one of these in combination with a 2-, 3- or 4-core AMD/Intel chip? The serious threads can be run on the faster chip, while all the background stuff can be spread among the slower cores? Does Windows have the ability to prioritize like that? Does Linux?

  • by jameskojiro ( 705701 ) on Monday October 26, 2009 @10:05AM (#29872679) Journal

    It is like 100 Dancing Hamsters in your CPU.

Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.

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