news.cnet.com — Intel is telling software developers to start thinking about not just tens but thousands of processing cores.the chipmaker is now thinking well beyond the traditional processor in a PC or server."The more cores we have the better. Provided that we can supply memory bandwidth to the device."
Jul 1, 2008 View in Crawl 4
mark076hJul 1, 2008Submitter
The Intel KiloCore Extreme Processor, sounds pretty nice
fantasticjonJul 2, 2008
Insert 5 paragraph diatribe about why intel is stupid for increasing the number of cores while HDDs are mechanical. Use some analogy about how a program moves spaceships or pixels to explain why this will never work. For the love of God, this is a good thing people. I remember when people would say, why do you need a Gig of RAM, that is overkill. If I could have a terabyte of RAM I would. I know I might never utilize it, but at least that is one less bottleneck. If I could have a million core chip, I would want it. (hyperbole of course, please don't reply to explain why a million core chip would need its own powerplant to run it.)
lengauJul 2, 2008
Meh... I'll try it eventually (I still have one from last year, too), but I think I'll stick with my electric.
abrasionJul 2, 2008
Not sure myself, happening a lot lately - can't be entirely sure.
seven07Jul 3, 2008
so we can presume in the future processors speed are measured in mega/giga-cores?
funkywoodJul 6, 2008
That's great for web farms but you're only ever going to have a few 'background' tasks to do like compression. Any more than about 20 cores is wasted on a home user.Compiler optimizations like Map-Reduce will help but code still needs to be written to enable it and it will only result in short bursts of parallel execution.Actually compressing a decompressing stuff in the background might have benefits but again the bottleneck now is memory.
ammundsenJul 12, 2008
Intel has good marketing. Clock speed being a current barrier they need something new to emphasize. 45 nanometer is better than 90, but by this measurement smaller is better. Marketing smaller numbers as better is contrary to most peoples expectations. So all they are left with is the number of cores.I recently switched to a dual core. I'm underwhelmed with the increased performance. The biggest advantages for me have come from the larger L2 cache.