AMD Says That CPU Core Race Can't Last Forever
128 cores? Sadly, no.
It wasn't too many CPU generations ago that the main focus of performance was clock speed. The public perception was that the more megahertz (or gigahertz), the better.
Now, the current competitive number appears to be in the number of cores inside a processor. Donald Newell, AMD's chief technology officer for servers, believes that this sort of race to an even greater number of cores cannot continue.
Interestingly enough, Newell knows all about the numbers game as he previously spent 16 years at Intel, during which time there was the very clock-happy Pentium 4 generation.
"We thought we were going to build a 10GHz chip. It was only when we discovered that they would get so hot it would melt through the Earth, that we decided not to do that," Newell said, jokingly, in an interview with IDG.
Now it's about who has more cores, but Newell doesn't see that continuing indefinitely.
"There will come an end to the core-count wars. I won't put an exact date on it, but I don't myself expect to see 128 cores on a full-sized server die by the end of this decade," said Newell. "It is not unrealistic from a technology road map, but from a deployment road map, the power constraints that people expect [servers] to live in."
While we haven't seen the end of core count growth, the next big competitive ground could be integrating specialized functions into the processor.
"There is nothing to prevent us to put specific features on die that enable more efficient processing," Newell said. "So you should expect to see heterogenous architectures to emerge where we identify functions that are broadly useful but don't necessarily map into an instruction that you'd want to add directly into the x86 architecture."
Both AMD and Intel are integrating graphics components into their processors, but AMD's Fusion solution promises to be the more capable offering with greater power available for GPGPU functions.
Source: IDG.

As they say, "All good things must come to an end".
I'm not very familiar with x86, but is a 32year old instruction set still useful?
The number of transistors in a processor has grown from 29 thousand to well over a billion in those 32 years.
As they say, "All good things must come to an end".
"My PC has 512 Core Clusters!"
Not surprising in the end though
/Off topic
The reason why passenger jets don't travel any faster now is because they would go (locally) supersonic if they fly any faster, and that would cause all sorts of noise and regulation problem (think Concord and how it's only allowed to fly over the ocean).
/endOffTopic
Anyway, I don't really see the CPUs going to 128 cores when the majority of the programs nowadays barely even utilize more than 2 cores.
and from this point it seems like decades for this to happen.
Also there is a problem with the way people are designing quantum computers:
1) Cool it down to 0K
2) Let's try to make it work some of the times.
Because in the past you had a few hundred computers to replace. Now you'll need the radical new technology to somehow be backwards compatible with billions of x86 machines because no business is going to changeover its entire IT framework in a day.
At some point it will happen though. The MOSFET is far too power-hungry to be viable in the long term future. Power consumption is what caused every other major technological transition of the most basic component in a computer.
I'm not very familiar with x86, but is a 32year old instruction set still useful?
The number of transistors in a processor has grown from 29 thousand to well over a billion in those 32 years.
The reason is not because of regulation or noise as the Concorde fleet ran flawlessly for nearly 30 years in the lucrative Trans-Atlantic market.
The reason why no-one travels supersonic anymore is the Concorde fleet was retired due to the French not keeping their runways clean, and the fact that the majority of Concordes regular passengers were killed in 9/11.
Virgin Atlantic offered to buy the Corcorde fleet and bring them up to 21st century specs but the UK Government refused to issue a license. On top of that no-one has the money to design and build a new fleet of supersonic airliners so the focus has now become one of increasing the comfort level of passengers, rather than reducing flight time.
The idea, and rightly so, is to split a single program up between several cores to make it run faster. Great idea in principle but where are the slew of multicore programs? ..... Silence.
Developers, please get off your collective fat asses and write the next generation of programs that can actually utilize all this expensive hardware I already own.