Intel Supercharges Atom Chips With 16 Cores and Pro Level Features (pcworld.com) 77
Agam Shah, writing for PCWorld: Intel's Atom was mostly known as a low-end chip for mobile devices that underperformed. That may not be the case anymore. The latest Atom C3000 chips announced on Tuesday have up to 16 cores and are more sophisticated than ever. The chips are made for storage arrays, networking equipment, and internet of things devices. The new chips have features found mostly in server chips, including networking, virtualization, and error correction features. [...] A surprising feature in C3000 is RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability) capabilities, which is mostly found on high-end Xeon chips. The feature corrects data errors on the fly and prevents networking and storage equipment from crashing.
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These chips are designed for very parallelizable applications like file serving, managing multiple simultaneous VPN clients, etc. You want one core per NIC for these to make the best use of AESNI plus one or two more for management tasks.
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"You want one core per NIC for these to make the best use of AESNI plus one or two more for management tasks."
One Core per NIC? Given the drastically reduced connectivity in the C3000 versus even desktop Pentium line processors in the form of fewer PCI-E lanes, good luck getting one PCI-E lane per NIC, let alone one core per.
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You want one core per NIC for these to make the best use of AESNI plus one or two more for management tasks.
While we're talking about massive parallelity, I want Knights [wikipedia.org] with NI.
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Re:Too many cores. (Score:5, Funny)
Going from 16 to 4 would be a light version of the chip, and everyone knows that Cores Light is garbage.
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Going from 16 to 4 would be a light version of the chip, and everyone knows that Cores Light is garbage.
I never drank Coors light.,
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Individual applications don't but open your task manager and look at how many processes are running. The more cores you have the more processing power the operating system has to distribute all those processes, and their threads, across. Furthermore some graphics programs and game engines sometimes use upwards of a dozen worker threads.
CPU power in general hasn't lept by great bounds in the last decade like it did 20 years ago when every new computer would be outdated in a year, so now the best strategy is
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You might have a couple hundred tasks, threads or processes that sit there and collectively eat about 0.1% CPU time. Some are daemons waiting all day for you doing something that use them, some are GUI threads that similarly do nothing. They're like that guy who sits in a basement full of military archives and watches TV all day, only doing actual work for a couple minute once every week or month when someone comes to visit him.
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Yeah, but he's really going to need them when he has to save America 500 years later with toilet water so it's better to have them and not need them than not having them in the first place.
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DIrect comparison (mips * clock frequency) is not a true measure.
There was a posting that doubted AMDs performance against equivalent Intel chips. The author used a frequency * mips rate to indicate throughput.
Here are some explanations about the difference between Ryzen and older CPU chip techolologies.
How to explain the difference? Here is my take. First of all, a 3 ghz frequency means that there are usually 6gig of clock ticks. Some instructions take multiple clock ticks. When cpus are implemented on 1
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Most people can't wrap their brains around more than two
Fortunately this is not a chip for most people, and boy are most people going to get upset if they look at their GPU.
, and most applications don't lend themselves to massive parallelization.
Actually a lot of the most computationally intensive tasks are embarrassingly parallel. But even if they aren't, who said we need to run one application per physical CPU? What version of DOS are you still running that doesn't allow multi-tasking?
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It's not just too many cores, it's too much everything. They've taken a crappy, underpowered chip that was trimmed to the bone to try and make something that competes with Arm, and are hacking on extras to make it sound more like a Xeon. In which case why not just use any non-Atom CPU, not necessarily a Xeon but just something that isn't as bare-bones as the Atom, and use that. Or an AMD G-series APU.
Or could this be Intel's trick, that they've taken a Core 2 Mobile CPU, scraped off the Penryn label, rep
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They've taken a crappy, underpowered chip that was trimmed to the bone to try and make something that competes with Arm, and are hacking on extras to make it sound more like a Xeon.
So it's like taking Pentium 3 and hacking on extras from Pentium 4 (the actual innovations around the core, not the GHz race) to make Pentium M, then putting several of these on a single die to make the Core series? Not a bad idea.
Or could this be Intel's trick, that they've taken a Core 2 Mobile CPU, scraped off the Penryn label, reprinted it as Atom++, and are shipping those?
I think this already happened a while ago, in a way. For instance, the original Atoms didn't have out-of-order execution, but the later ones do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] It looks a bit like the Pentium brand that lives on as the low end of Cores.
BTW, I have one of the
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So it's like taking Pentium 3 and hacking on extras from Pentium 4 (the actual innovations around the core, not the GHz race) to make Pentium M, then putting several of these on a single die to make the Core series?
It's not like that. It's like inventing a new execution unit primarily intended to preserve high margins on core architecture chips by delivering substantially worse superscalar performance. Billed as power efficient, the latest generation with out of order execution still delivers worse performance at the low power end then celerons. It's a scam. Intel knows what to do to make Atom not suck: just throw it away and use core arch. But the charade is going to continue as long as Intel is able to avoid serious
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Embedded/ultra low power CPUs is where Intel does have serious competition. It's the desktop arena where they have a virtual monopoly.
Yes, and they keep trying to push crappy Atom parts into that market segment to avoid cutting margin on their low power celerons, which are better than Atoms by every measure including power consumption. I thought I already said that?
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16 is about 12 too many. Most people can't wrap their brains around more than two, and most applications don't lend themselves to massive parallelization.
The thing I'm not getting is: is the Atom supposed to be a low power chip, or a low cost chip? I don't see how either of them is satisfied by blowing things up to 16 cores.
Next up (Score:2)
Apple switching to 16-cores A16M ARM processors for their new Macs.
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More like Apple switching to the "Brand new" i3 processor for their newest generation of outdated powerbooks.
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I bet there are some people who have a touch screen laptop but don't know the screen can be touched.
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Virtual breasts, right?
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Apple switching to 16-cores A16M ARM processors for their new Macs.
This would make a lot of sense. Is the A16M from their A line of CPUs? They might as well use the same CPU in their Macs as they use in iPhones, so that their Macs can leverage iPhone apps. There is no compelling reason for Macs to be x64 (the way there is for Windows)
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AFAIK they're up to "A10" now, I just imagined a new model number that was "16" as in sixteen cores and I added M at the end for Mac.
But yes, increasing their profits (Tim Cook would never lower Mac prices, even though he doesn't seem to care about Macs at all) could be done by using their own ARM CPUs instead of paying Intel for their overpriced CPUs.
Tim Cook seems to think an iPad Pro can replace a computer, so the next logical step is to replace the computer hardware with iPad hardware.
Bonus points if th
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Profits would be one - and the main - thing definitely, but it would also give Apple a simpler ecosystem to maintain. It would be them doing what Microsoft tried in Windows 8, but better: merge the OS X and iOS code bases to the binary level, and eliminate the need for fat binaries. It would also make available to the Mac just about every app that's available for iOS. While some of them - such as Vonage or Lyft - maybe unsuitable for Macs, others, such as WhatsApp, could be very useful - enablin
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Apple could get most of those benefits by "simply" requiring submissions to the App Store be universal binaries compiled for Intel.
For me, the availability of Windows in virtualization trumps the ability to run iOS apps outside of virtualization. Frankly, most of them would be bizarre on a huge laptop screen - like viewing a mobile website on a desktop computer. The only thing keeping me on Mac is its "universal" status. I can run Windows, Mac, various unixes. I can compile X11 apps, develop for iOS or Andr
Sounds Nice (Score:2)
I have just finished building a pfSense firewall/proxy/router etc based on a PC Engines APU SOC. This has 4 AMD cores and 4 GB of RAM and is plenty powerful enough for what I need.
I guess 16 cores with all those extra bells and whistles would be nice for bigger customers than mine, but to be honest, the box I put together is plenty good enough, and the price was right.
Maybe the SME type market is not where Intel wants to play.
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Dunno what kind of traffic you are looking to route but that seems like an overkill. Or is it, AMD APUs are pretty bad at bandwidth actually?
Using an AMD APU for this application *is* overkill but they are inexpensive, their motherboards are inexpensive, and they draw a reasonably low amount of power.
Finally ECC-RAM (Score:1)
Can we have this in desktop processors too now, please? Bit errors in RAM are an underestimated source of data corruption and crashes.
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Core i3, Pentium, and Celeron chips all support ECC. Good luck finding a motherboard with all 72 data pins wired though.
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Core i3, Pentium, and Celeron chips all support ECC. Good luck finding a motherboard with all 72 data pins wired though.
They are not that difficult to find. Look for LGA1150 and LGA1151 workstation/server motherboards which use C series (or I guess the X99?) south bridges.
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I've had pretty good results with the Asrock H87WSA-DL "workstation" board. Very reasonably priced compared to "server" boards.
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I'd like if the voltage sensors worked under linux. I wanted to blame libsensors but I was told to blame desktop motherboards. You can run memtest once in a while as a weak alternative to ECC on a desktop but you can't diagnose the power supply without Windows.
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Also on my current motherboard both the manufacturers windows utility and lm-sensors show mostly bogus values because they read raw values, only the bios setup screen shows the correct values.
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Wow, running "vanilla" sensors-detect did work, I think I had not tried that for a looong time. (Motherboard is old). You have to understand what the hell it displays and prompts you. It gave me the name of a kernel module for the Super I/O chip, you load it and everything is there albeit the voltage are almost all wrong, like they think they're measuring 3.3 volts voltages. One is at "0.10 volt", maybe that's the mysterious -12V. First one seems to be an accurate vcore, second one maybe memory controller v
McFillem (Score:1)
They'll just fill up more cores with @#&$% McAfee scans; they own half the company. It's like a dog breeding company also selling pooper-scoopers.
UltimateTarget for Atom: Cars and Trucks (Score:5, Insightful)
They'd like a spot at the table of the massive amount of chips that will be needed in autonomous cars and other AI driven machines. Parrelization works very well in processing data from lots of sensors. I suspect this is just the beginning.
The Real Question: (Score:1)
Will these last longer than 18 months?
Re:Netbook and this please. (Score:5, Interesting)
I would be happy with a mini rack/blade system about the size of a HP MicroServer, with the ability to add 4-8 of these CPU boards in it as blades, each board having a SSD big enough to load a Linux distro or ESXi... and one has a nice CPU farm that doesn't take much space, but can run a lot of lightweight VMs very economically.
bugfixes ? (Score:2)