Researchers Unveil Experimental 36-Core Chip 143
rtoz writes The more cores — or processing units — a computer chip has, the bigger the problem of communication between cores becomes. For years, Li-Shiuan Peh, the Singapore Research Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, has argued that the massively multicore chips of the future will need to resemble little Internets, where each core has an associated router, and data travels between cores in packets of fixed size. This week, at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Peh's group unveiled a 36-core chip that features just such a "network-on-chip." In addition to implementing many of the group's earlier ideas, it also solves one of the problems that has bedeviled previous attempts to design networks-on-chip: maintaining cache coherence, or ensuring that cores' locally stored copies of globally accessible data remain up to date.
Re:Different Power Supply Voltage (Score:1, Insightful)
According to the comparison table, (Refer timeline 4:21 of this video) this chip uses 1.1V while other standard chips are using 1.0V. This difference may make it hard for the chip makers to use this technology.
Really? They won't be able to specify a 1.1V VRM instead of a 1.0V VRM? Those poor, poor chip makers. They sound like a bunch of incompetent fucks.
Re:Moore's Law (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, Liquid Nitrogen cooling gets you past the speed limits. How about over 8Ghz [youtube.com] on a chip that costs less than $200? Going to Helium and you can get over 8.5Ghz. [youtube.com] although both become a bit unweildy when it comes to game play because I don't want my hard drives to freeze. I love that last video there's some real country boy engineering there including using a propane torch and a hair dryer to keep certain components from freezing.
I'm a little confused as to why you're citing the chip's low low price of "less than $200" if you need liquid nitrogen to get it to perform the way you want it to. You do realize that cooling systems cost money, too...right? There's no point in being able to use a cheap processor to get to X performance benchmark if the required additional support systems cost thousands of dollars more than a more powerful and more expensive processor that can do it out of the box. Not to mention the fact that liquid nitrogen cooling isn't exactly hassle-free, especially in a household environment. And it's worth noting that even if you boost Ghz, you eventually run into choke points related to pushing data to and from the chip anyways. You can give the most important worker on an assembly line all the crystal meth they can eat, but they can't work any faster than the conveyor belt in front of them.