Forty-eight-core processor in action, or the return of the P54
Last week was in Brussels on business. Among other cases, the vision of a running computer on a 48-core x86 processor, which was shown at Research @ Intel, was considered. Honestly, I wanted to look at the beast. Forty-eight cores! Well this is dropsy, at least! And even that is more severe. And the power supply is ten kilowatts! And then you go into the room, and there ... normal system unit.
The usual bigtower, inside is quite a normal propeller on a medium-sized radiator. Honestly, I've seen it bigger and on Core 2 Duo.
')
How much power the power supply can not say, because the stickers were removed from it, and the excess was wrapped with opaque tape. But nothing frightening in appearance. And it is known that under maximum load the processor consumes 125 watts, and during idle time - only 25.
So what's the catch?
Yes, the cores in the processor are not simple, but good old P54. Let me remind you that these were used in the second generation of Pentium processors operating at a frequency of 75 to 200 MHz. Only then did P54 be made using 0.6 µm technology, and now it has been switched to 45 nm. As a result, all 48 cores, together with four memory controllers and 24 special routers (routers), which ensure effective interaction with the latter, occupy approximately the same area as the original P54 with its one and only core.
The frequency of the processor was not disclosed, but it is unlikely to be very high. After all, its task is not to set speed records, but to serve as a testing ground for software tests of the next generation. Now programmers are puzzled over how normally 4-6 cores are used, and then immediately 48 in one chip! And, as far as I know, this is not the limit - if necessary, you can shove a few hundred. So what are 6 cores compared to this abundance? So, the dull semblance of Hyper-Threading ...
In the meantime, everything is so sample that even the memory of the video adapter is placed on a regular notebook module.
At Intel itself, the processor is positioned as a prototype of a cloud computer on a single chip. And here not even a performance issue comes out on top, but which network interfaces will serve this miracle. At least, on a prototype usual Ethernet does not even smell.
About other future Intel products, I wrote a rather large article on 3Dnews, if you're interested - welcome.
And the secret is revealed in the same place - why processor manufacturers do not soar when they mark expensive crystals for cheap ones. AMD lovers can easily sleep :)
The usual bigtower, inside is quite a normal propeller on a medium-sized radiator. Honestly, I've seen it bigger and on Core 2 Duo.
')
How much power the power supply can not say, because the stickers were removed from it, and the excess was wrapped with opaque tape. But nothing frightening in appearance. And it is known that under maximum load the processor consumes 125 watts, and during idle time - only 25.
So what's the catch?
Yes, the cores in the processor are not simple, but good old P54. Let me remind you that these were used in the second generation of Pentium processors operating at a frequency of 75 to 200 MHz. Only then did P54 be made using 0.6 µm technology, and now it has been switched to 45 nm. As a result, all 48 cores, together with four memory controllers and 24 special routers (routers), which ensure effective interaction with the latter, occupy approximately the same area as the original P54 with its one and only core.
The frequency of the processor was not disclosed, but it is unlikely to be very high. After all, its task is not to set speed records, but to serve as a testing ground for software tests of the next generation. Now programmers are puzzled over how normally 4-6 cores are used, and then immediately 48 in one chip! And, as far as I know, this is not the limit - if necessary, you can shove a few hundred. So what are 6 cores compared to this abundance? So, the dull semblance of Hyper-Threading ...
In the meantime, everything is so sample that even the memory of the video adapter is placed on a regular notebook module.
At Intel itself, the processor is positioned as a prototype of a cloud computer on a single chip. And here not even a performance issue comes out on top, but which network interfaces will serve this miracle. At least, on a prototype usual Ethernet does not even smell.
About other future Intel products, I wrote a rather large article on 3Dnews, if you're interested - welcome.
And the secret is revealed in the same place - why processor manufacturers do not soar when they mark expensive crystals for cheap ones. AMD lovers can easily sleep :)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/93533/
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