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Comments: 191 +- Hardware: Tilera To Release 100-Core Processor on Monday October 26, @03:27AM
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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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This is great ! (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
... and just imagine a Beowulf cluster of them.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It IS a Beowulf cluster.
Obligatory Princess Bride quote:
Miracle Max: Go away or I'll call the brute squad!
Fezzik: I'm ON the brute squad.
Miracle Max: [opens door] You ARE the brute squad!
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Re:This is great ! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Give it a break, shillboy
We've all seen more than enough paid endorsements of Microsoft's latest exercise in blandness.
Settle down, Linus.
Re:This is great ! (Score:5, Insightful)
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"
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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)
Actually, some algorithms (like fluid simulation and a very large neural net) are not that hard to parallelize to run on a million cores.
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Yes, but taking an arbitrary single-threaded algorithm and automatically figuring out what the parallelization is is the hard part. =]
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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:This is great ! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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)
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)
Sources are always appreciated when you tell us something.
Here is the source: http://www.kernel.org/ [kernel.org]
Parent
Allow ia64 to CONFIG_NR_CPUS up to 4096 (Score:5, Informative)
CC.
Parent
Re:This is great ! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:This is great ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Awfully generous with the term "core" (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
When does a CPU become the CPU? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When does a CPU become the CPU? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Parent
Re:When does a CPU become the CPU? (Score:5, Informative)
The Register [channelregister.co.uk] goes into more detail than this article, as usal.
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...
Parent
Custom ISA? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
From a quick Google - its based on the ARM core (easily licensable cpu core)
Parent
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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)
Parent
why not go to the source? (Score:3, Informative)
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]...
Re:Custom ISA? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Custom ISA? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
FreeBSD and GCD (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:2)
"...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.
100? (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Parent
Re:100? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:100? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Sounds Like (Score:2)
Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt... (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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...
looks like (Score:4, Funny)
asymmetric (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Dancing Hamsters... (Score:3, Funny)
It is like 100 Dancing Hamsters in your CPU.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, they are derived from the MIPS architecture.
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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.