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.

Not usefull yet..

[CockroachMan]

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.

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

[fitten]

Actually... I think it's more FLoating Point OPerations per Second.

One floating point operation (say, an add), is a FLOP, not a FLO. Just like a No OPeration is a NOP (alternatively, NOOP, but assembly mnemonic is almost always NOP). If you want to know the rate at which a processor executes FLOPs, you say that it computes at X FLOPS.

Re:Dude....

[jollyreaper]

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.