IDF Fall 2006: From Core 2 Quadro to 80 Cores

Four Processor Cores For Games!

Remedy is working on quad core support for games and the early demo was pretty impressive.

Games and multi-core processors were mentioned in almost every tech session that dealt with quad and multi-core CPUs. Game developer Remedy showed impressively how games can benefit from multi-core processors by sharing workloads across multiple processing units.

80 FPU Cores On A Chip For Teraflop Performance

Intel is experimenting with multi-core (80 cores) processors to hit teraflop performance on a single chip.

This is not a drill, this is serious: Intel is in the process of developing multi-core processors that are capable of increasing floating-point performance into the spheres that are reached by computing clusters today. The projected performance of Intel's 80-core prototypes at the time it could become available is expected to hit one teraflop. At this point it's also interesting to note the floating point performance of a Pentium 4 processor: A 3 GHz model reaches 0.006 teraflops, which underlines the impressive capabilities of the 80-core prototype. We have to add that floating point performance is more important for scientific applications and number crunching than it is for desktop applications, but it might enable geologists to analyze drill test samples on their way home instead of processing it in expensive server farms.

The teraflop prototypes are large and rather sophisticated, but they host 80 FPU processing units on a single die.