Intel To Ship 48-Core Test Systems To Researchers 135
MojoKid writes "Just when you thought your 6-core chip was the fastest processor on the planet, Intel announces plans to ship systems equipped with an experimental 48-core CPU to a handful of lucky researchers sometime by the end of the second quarter. The 48 cores are arranged with multiple connect points in a serial mesh network to transfer data between cores. Each core also has on-chip buffers to instantly exchange data in parallel across all cores. According to Sean Koehl, technology evangelist with Intel Labs, the chip only draws between 25 and 125 watts."
bullshitter (Score:3, Insightful)
>>> Sean Koehl, technology evangelist
Oh... a bullshitter
Can you imagine... (Score:4, Insightful)
...a Beowulf cluster of engineers awkwardly reading marketing information from a teleprompter?
Re:And it runs Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
If they distribute it to the researchers they must release it to the researchers or commit a GPL violation.
Of course the researchers don't want to demand source since then they won't get freebies like this the next time Intel does such a Santa Claus imitation of distributing presents.
There's an interesting thought: what happens if you are a beta tester who has to sign a NDA to get something which includes GPL code. What takes precedence? Your NDA, or your right to demand source to the GPL stuff and redistribute it publically?
Re:I just have to ask (Score:5, Insightful)
Now 48 CPUs can wait for the disk!
Re:Correction (Score:3, Insightful)
The fastest commercially available x86 chips have been a little under 4 GHz for about five years now.
Megahertz Myth. As far as I can tell, over the last 5 years individual cores have still been getting faster, just not with higher clock speeds.
Re:And it runs Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
What takes precedence? Your NDA, or your right to demand source to the GPL stuff and redistribute it publically?
It's complicated. The GPL takes priority because the NDA is in violation of it, however the problem is that, by making you sign the NDA, Intel[1] is in violation of the GPL, but you do not have standing to sue them for it. The kernel developers could sue Intel for copyright infringement, by distributing their code without a valid license to do so. Intel could sue you for breach of the NDA. You, however, would have no recourse against Intel if you chose to distribute the code.
In fact, Intel could distribute the kernel under some terms other than the GPL, preventing you from distributing it legally. They would also be committing copyright infringement, but only the original copyright owners would have standing to sue, it wouldn't help you at all if they decided not to bother.
[1] Names of organisations in this post are hypothetical placeholders. I am not accusing Intel of GPL violation.
Re:I just have to ask (Score:2, Insightful)
Having said that I'm a researcher who writes and uses high-performance parallel software daily. How might I become one of Intel's select few to trial these chips? I can certainly think of ways to keep them warm!
ummm, lets start by not explaining why one of these things won't help your research?
48 cores (Score:5, Insightful)
And still one external memory bus.
Re:Multiprocessing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tilera (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because source code is available... Even ironing out x86-64 (which millions of people can use) has taken years for the linux distros.
Interesting. See, I was running 64 bit distros when Vista was still called Longhorn. I'm also quite sure it was a year or so before XP x64 edition was released. And everything ran great. The only problem I had was flash. Of course, I had the source for everything except for, you guessed it, flash. Imagine that.
Re:Larrabee (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah. that's what I was thinking too. It suddenly becomes a whole lot less exciting when you consider that it's just a 48 core first generation Pentium rather than a 48 core i7.
Re:I just have to ask (Score:3, Insightful)
That doesn't really help me as long as people are doing disk I/O in the GUI thread.
Re:I just have to ask (Score:3, Insightful)
Now 48 CPUs can block on cache misses!
fixed. Memory is the new disk.
Re:Multiprocessing (Score:1, Insightful)
SMP has been around a long time. I remember in 1993 and 1994 that people were trying to do their best to get code working on 4 CPU SGI Indigos.
Re:I just have to ask (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me save you some time, trouble and hair - your problems are too difficult to solve numerically. Go find something else to do
unless you plan to live for a very, very long time.