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POWER6, Intel's 80-core chip, and more at ISSCC '07

arstechnica.com — The program for the 2007 International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in early February is out, and Stephen Shankland over at CNET spotted it before I did. You might have seen his article a few days ago, so here's my own take on the program's highlights.

Who dugg this? Made popular Jan 4, 2007

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  • WaterDragon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+26OMG...the last thing I saw that had 80 cores was.....a bushel of apples!
  • digitalsin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14Man, I wish I was cool enough to one day attend the International Solid State Circuits Conference!
  • jordan314, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6And 700 million transistors!
    I was blown away to learn that my current P4 chip has 100 million transistors. Or that even a 486 chip had over 1 million transistors.
    How the crap do they get that many transistors in such a tiny thin thing? No wonder computers used to take up whole rooms.
  • Satanael, on 10/12/2007, -0/+680 cores...
    Somewhere a software developer is crying.
  • delta013, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7There new slogan should be "Intel Army Inside".
  • drlha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6IBM POWER architecture is used in their servers and big expensive computers you can't afford! The POWER6 chips will most likely costs thousands each, just like the POWER4 and POWER5 before them. Note that the PowerPC architecture is based on the POWER architecture, they're not the same chips. For example the PowerPC G5 used in Macs is based on a cut down version of the POWER4 architecture. As far as I know IBM never released a consumer level chip based on POWER5, probably one of the many reasons Apple decided to dump them.
  • GrumpyFan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Holy Smokes! 80 Cores! How do they keep the thing from melting or exploding?

    But, I guess the upside is we shouldn't need to upgrade again until the next version of Windows.
  • LegendarySock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4They're insane! They're going to destroy the world!
  • vashmyvindows, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5The Power6 will be DOA when AMD pushes its Killer7 at the same time. It'll have only 7 cores, but one of them will be a mexican wrestler...
  • gwolf, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4It will become self aware at 2:46 A.M. March 10th 2011.
  • digitalrift, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3not to knock the wow factor that they jammed 80 cores into such a small space, but isn't there a whole diminishing returns thing?
  • pdahlem, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm sure people will come up with a use for them. The market for these things is gaming consoles (they're the only place IBM is selling the Power chips these days that I know of), and game developers are always pushing the envelope and looking for more out of the system.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5what 80 core !
  • gsnedders, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The IBM PPC970 family (more commonly known under the "G5" moniker) is based on the POWER4. The IBM PPC980 (still under development - it's development being the reason there was no 3GHz 970 - IBM was putting resources into the 980) is based on the POWER5, and is designed from the ground up for 65nm, dual core, lower power consumption (and with that use in laptops). It'll probably make it into "entry-level" servers (to the extent IBM makes entry-level servers), blades, and several workstations.
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Welcome to the computing age. Your Pentium 4 probably has around 200 million transistors, depending on which generation it is (the latest generation P4s top out at just under 300 million). The Cell is around 260M. Certain Itanium II models have 1.7 Billion transistors.

    When you think that a transistor used to be the size of a 9V (vacuum tubes/relays), and think that 100+ transistors now can fit within a human blood cell comfortably (65nm lithography), you realize how far we've come. And the fact that we can produce these devices reliably is really mind-boggling. So reliably that we've started building micro-machinery and using them for common tasks (for example the Wiimotes which use a "solid state" accelerometer). IBM's working on the same thing to replace hard drives (imagine going back to tape-and-reel, only with the tape being a 100mm strip of silicon, and the read-head being only a few nanometers wide.
  • robohoe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Are we ever going need to use all these 80 cores?
  • Ademan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Raytracing should scale well even beyond that. You're at the VERY LEAST, casting Xresolution*Yresolution rays PER FRAME. On top of that you calculate reflections, refractions, etc (well, of course, that's the point of ray tracing, but meh)
  • MeltedUFO, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Can you buy the processors/motherboards alone? I was looking to build a Linux machine with the POWER arch but could only find them in servers..
  • CCB0x45, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2from happiness or sadness? No more optimizations, just use a different thread for EVERYTHING!
  • slothlovechunk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I could use them right now. I would love one.

    Raytracing scales quite well up to even 1024 processors.

    There are many very parrallelizable algorithms out there. You get enough parallel processors then you get closer and closer to solving non-deterministic polynomial problems in polynomial time.
  • whosmatt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1the headline makes it sound like the power6 is the name of intel's chip
  • thedillydotcom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1call me crazy but wasnt there a RISC version of windows for the old DEC chips as well as an intel itanium non x86 chip version?

    I COULD BE WRONG... but i thought there was and there just was no software written to take advantage of the raw power of the thing
  • CCB0x45, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1funny that Nintendo had that commercial as sega was the one with "blast processing"... intel should look into integrating that into this 80 core chip somehow, sounds much catchier.
  • dawgma, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Can we start talking about something else besides the 80-core chip? You're never going to see that chip in a consumer desktop, so lets get back down to Earth.
  • mtappenden, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You flaming dipstick! That's what that chip is for, it's just not designed to do it YET. ot for a few years. Dipstick! Read up on things before you post that crap! DIPATICK!
  • jordan314, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Cool!
    How the heck does a solid state accelerometer work?
  • sinembarg0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is unreliable. POWER6 is IBM, not Intel, and is a PowerPC processor. POWER5 and POWER4 are both IBM chips. There was also an article the other day here on digg that said the next generation of IBM's PowerPC processor (which logically is POWER6) would hit 5GHz.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power5
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power4
  • Sage-Tech, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1When did Intel get purchased by Cyberdyne?
  • sinembarg0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1POWER6 is not x86, so you won't be able to use this for any version of Windows.
  • WiseAcre, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I think he's talking about Vista.
  • swiftekho, on 10/12/2007, -2/+280 cores is old news to anyone who saw the frisbee they had back in September. Still great to see they are still running with the idea and it wasn't a publicity stunt though.
  • slothlovechunk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has"
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1cores are useless without software to utilize them. they will be less powerful and overall almost the same performance until software cathes up. then the silicon age for processors will be ending and the light age will kick in.
  • thebeck, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Not x86 compatible though. It would still kick ass as a co-processor of course.
  • Phazer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+080 Cores! That is incredible, does anyone remember that old NES advert where the kids house actually launches into space because of the RAW POWER!!! 80 cores will make that a reality, see yea in space bitches XD...
  • sanman, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Sounds very power-efficient. Only activate and run as many cores as you need, while the rest can remain inactive. So is there a plan to bring it to market, or is it one of those forever-a-demo models?
  • WiseAcre, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Sorry, the second you pull the heatsink off the universe will implode.
  • GrumpyFan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1This is just too good. Had to add another.

    "Intel's new 80 core CPU can also be used as a desktop grille. No more waiting to use the office microwave, simply open the lid of the CPU, place your food atop the cooling (grilling) fins and 10 seconds later you're ready to eat!"

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