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Intel: from 16 Cores to 80 CoresNow it has become just a matter of time |
By Dan Frincu, Hardware Editor
17th of April 2007, 13:01 GMT
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Just as things were looking like they started to cool down in Intel land, they come up and stir the water, rise the dust, and make themselves heard again. If anything is sure, it's that Intel is very determined to stay on top of the game, even if there is no immediate threat, they still take all the necessary measures to ensure that they keep the spotlight on them. And how in the past they probably had some sort of a dispute with AMD
, now it has escalated to a full blown war. It started with Intel copying every good thing that AMD did and putting their name on the product.
This is how Core microarchitecture appeared, I've already discussed about Skulltrail, an "alternative" to AMD's Quad FX, and now there is Larabee. The architecture behind Larabee is set to become something similar to the unified shader architecture NVIDIA G8x series of video cards uses. From that point and up until designing a "one processor does it all" it will be just a small leap. For now, Larabee's attempt is to take over the dedicated graphics market, the chips themselves will be made out of as many as 16 cores, with each core being able of performing four threads per core.
The connection became obvious as I saw the General Purpose Computing on GPU's. The first step into the desktop market was made by NVIDIA's new series of graphics cards, which are capable of processing any type of information in floating point format, thus making them a worthy adversary for AMD's Fusion concept, and also these processors could very well be the future of the normal CPU, as we know it.
Pat Gelsinger said that: "Intel has begun planning products based on a highly parallel, IA-based programmable architecture codenamed "Larrabee." It will be easily programmable using many existing software tools, and designed to scale to trillions of floating point operations per second (Teraflops) of performance. The Larrabee architecture will include enhancements to accelerate applications such as scientific computing, recognition, mining, synthesis, visualization, financial analytics and health applications."
This is simple to lay out on the table, AMD is outsourcing its HyperTransport technology so that many applications could be developed for it, one of which is to integrate co-processors on cards that will run on PCI-Express extension slots. Now here's another interesting fact, Intel is said to have also outsourced its FSB technology so that you can create applications for it, and the first device for this is called Xilinx Virtex 5, a 604-pin module that fits snugly into the Intel Xeon infrastructure.
How does it all tie together with the 80-core chip that Intel already demonstrated earlier this year, well let us think for a while. If you can't even handle a quad-core processor, and must use a Multi Chip Module in order to have two dual-core processors linked together, how on Earth will you succeed in doing so with 80 processor cores in an even smaller package then the one you are currently using? Simple, you make the processor do anything, the trend has already started with the System-on-a-chip initiative, why not take it all the way to the possible extent to which the technology will allow it. I mean, it won't be long until Moore's Law won't apply anymore, so what do you do then, retire? I guess not, maybe just innovate in some other way; the unified, not even shader, lets call it the unified core architecture will allow for a computer to perform whatever type of calculations you see necessary, and will include have a CPU and a GPU sharing the same processor die. Now it all makes perfect sense.
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