Intel to Ship Experimental Chips With 48 Cores
Don't ask.
While we may be mightily impressed at the multiplying of cores in the hexacore Gulftown Core i7-980X, the octacore Nehalem-EX Xeon 7500 and the dodecacore AMD Magny-Cours Opteron 6000 series, Intel has something special up its sleeve that it is releasing in limited quantities – and it has 48 cores.
Intel's been testing an experimental 48-core CPU for some time, and it is now preparing to ship some of those to researchers by the end of the second quarter, according to IDG News Service. The chip will primarily be sent to academic institutions, but certain special features the chip could eventually find their way into commercial offerings.
For example, the 48-core chip features 24 small routers between the cores, which facilitate faster data exchanges across the chip. Each core also has on-chip buffers that can instantly exchange data in parallel across all the cores.
Intel also says that the 48-core chip has a more advanced on-die power management system that can vary the power draw between 25 watts to 125 watts. It can also reduce clock speed and shut down cores.
As far as clock speeds go, current desktop and even laptop offerings outpace this 48-core wonder. Intel revealed that its experimental chip runs at about the same frequencies as the Atom CPU, so we're looking in the neighbourhood of 1.2GHz to 1.83GHz.
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Don't ask what? *Puts on an innocent face*
first!
I still like my dual core
That made me laugh.
Can it run....cr, I mean FSX?
what happened to the 80 core variants they were touting a couple years ago?
I know it's not for desktops, but it's fun to imagine putting this in your rig, opening up the task manager, and then trying to max all the cores. I'm not sure I even have enough programs to be able to utilize half of it. I envy those researchers who get to play with it.
Just buy two for 84 Core Leetness.
Who needs a heater during the winter when you have a 48 core processor to keep your house warm. Right?
Just buy two for 84 Core Leetness.
two would be 96 not 84
Just buy two for 84 Core Leetness.
48+48 = 96
Sorry.
@MrHectorEric
Folding@Home SMP Client, I'm not sure, but maybe it could acess all 48 cores.
Otherwise,
Same idea, using an SMP client, and then just assigning an 8 core utilizing one to five different sets of cores.
If you have the F@H clients set up right, they are pretty much
*Devours free processing power*
.. hope I didn't come off as one of those 'one up' posters, just getting my thoughts out there..
and..
Can it run Crysis... 2?
Can it play Duke Nukem forever?
We said the same thing at almost the same time lol
Ah I remember hearing about this thing, the 48 core cpu advertised in the past to be the size of a thumb nail
I was hoping it would be at least 3 ghz, but that would just be ludicrous.
Apparently our software can't even take full advantage of 2 cores. 48 sounds like overkill for any machine today.
what? no hyperthreading?
I know it's not for desktops, but it's fun to imagine putting this in your rig, opening up the task manager, and then trying to max all the cores. I'm not sure I even have enough programs to be able to utilize half of it. I envy those researchers who get to play with it.
Just run Prime 95,etc.
first!
FAIL!
Can it play Duke Nukem forever?
sorry but you need a flux capacitor for that one.
I would love it, Use lightwave, and those are 48 render nodes.. Just the problem would You would need a ton of ram..
wasnt this suppose 2 b LRB?
man, with one of those, you dont even need an entire renderfarm, you can use just one computer.
Amazing. Imagine running Folding@Home!
This is more likely for AI applications. It's parallel structure including the router interconnect architechture would be ideal for parallel programming applications required in neural networks and anything really that could be done better using parallel streams of information processing. I'd love to see how the I/O's are connected. You would be able to do so much parallel processing of sensor information. It could analyze so much! You actually want a 3GHz system! Why!! this 1GHz systems not even being used yet! Multi-tasking operating systems have been trying to simulate this thing since the days of DOS. I would personally love to work with this thing. It would be my dream job/year if I could take a masters and just develope... this will be used in the future for some interesting creations. I would also much rather this technology being implemented into applications over the Cloud. Local is a much better idea
. This thing just blew my mind
sounds like larabee to me
oh my crazy god what is happening
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/T [...] 10127.html
All the people thinking gaming or other typical computer tasks need to stop. This thing is not x86 (x64), that should be obvious in its clock speed and design. Its a RISC cpu specifically designed for huge parallel operation, an older CPU would slaughter this in any gaming.
No this baby is designed for something much bigger. AI, scientific research, doing 3D PIC simulations of a nuclear reaction (currently nothing we have is capable of doing that in less then a day or three). You take a bunch of these and connect them all together in a Unix style OS, then custom design programs for them that run batch processing jobs. Feed it data and let it work its magic.
palladin... lets do this.
48 cores is nothing current technology the stuff that public sector does not see are 200 core cpu's that exist not for public use that are contracted out.
There are non x86-x64 cpu's out there with 100 cores that are created by tilera number of cores in cpu's are expanding due to the barrier that technology has hit in pure speed for a single cpu, more cores is the way to go true parallel multitasking cannot be done using windows yet, and handles multiple cores poorly.
All the people thinking gaming or other typical computer tasks need to stop. This thing is not x86 (x64), that should be obvious in its clock speed and design. Its a RISC cpu specifically designed for huge parallel operation, an older CPU would slaughter this in any gaming.No this baby is designed for something much bigger. AI, scientific research, doing 3D PIC simulations of a nuclear reaction (currently nothing we have is capable of doing that in less then a day or three). You take a bunch of these and connect them all together in a Unix style OS, then custom design programs for them that run batch processing jobs. Feed it data and let it work its magic.
However, it's been stated it does run x86 applications, and considering the very first comment by the author of the article... It's pretty obvious what people were going to think about anyway.
And why not some typical computer tasks? For example, I think asking whether these 48 cores could outstrip, say, a GTX 295 using CUDA in video encoding would be interesting.