80 cores in 5 years, intel says

arshlevon

over one terabyte a second. the future is pretty cool.

http://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-6119618.html?part=rss&tag=6119618&subj=news

Mister Sentient

With all those cores I'd say the future is pretty hot.

Mongrelman

I see what you did there :P

Wonder what king of PSU you will need.

nealb4me

Can't wait to read my emails on it.

Mark Dygert

And all we need to power it are in-home nuclear plants. I say the future is in vacume tubes, buy stock now!

Penzer

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And all we need to power it are in-home nuclear plants. I say the future is in vacume tubes, buy stock now!

[/ QUOTE ]

It will run on human souls! Maybe Star Trek isn't so far off :P

sonic

great for servers/supercomputers, pretty much useless for the rest of us also, they don't even have an integer unit on the chip or any of the other parts of the processor, just the fp

Mongrelman

[ QUOTE ]
It will run on human souls! Maybe Star Trek isn't so far off :P

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Looks like EA will have a new product to sell.

hawken

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great for servers/supercomputers, pretty much useless for the rest of us also, they don't even have an integer unit on the chip or any of the other parts of the processor, just the fp

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faster processors are good for everyone. I find computers way too slow, plus with more power you can have things like better speech recognition and intelligent AI

sonic

i'm not saying that faster processors aren't good. each of those cores is clocked at only like 3.2ghz. unless you somehow wrote a game or an application to use 80 (prob 160 with HT) threads (which no one will), it's completely useless. look how much trouble people are having with the ps3 and its 6 separate threads. servers will use this to a great extent because you could use this one processor for a sql server, file server, xml request server, etc all in one. supercomputers would be perfect for this because they need to perform shitloads of different calculations at once, and it can simply divide the calculations between the processors.

arshlevon

sonic, i dont know much about processors, but from what your saying intels duel and new quad core processors are not any faster at all than the single core ones unless you have programs that are specifically written to use all 4 cores? i really know nothing about them, but if thats the case why upgrade?

Soccerman18

For the same reason people have dual processor systems. A single processor can only do so much in a given time. Utilizing additional processors allows you to process more instructions in the same amount of time, even if the are the same speed as your single processor system. Right now I have 48 processes running on my computer, most of which are probably pretty independent, if my comp had 4 processors running on it then it might be possible to break it up so that each processor handles 12 of them.

Back at Purdue I worked on a comp that had 8 processors in it and I was able to assign a different process to each processor. Using all 8 I was able to finish analyzing a processor design in a week where it could have taken months on a single processor.

Right now most programs aren't written to fully utilize a multi core system. But as multi core processors become more common and people start designing with them in mind you would see a significant improvement in performance.

Mongrelman

How long do you think before there are multi core GPUs?