An answer to Intel's 80-core mystery
404225
Blog: Why 80 cores? There's actually nothing magic about the number.
259919
Get with our 2014 program IDF Once in multi-core processor denial, Intel has well and truly moved past the anxiety that follows abandoning the "boost GHz at all costs" mentality that served the company well for so long. So firm is Intel's new multi-core embrace, that it now even accepts the idea that non-Intel architecture products may soon find a place on its own chips â at least in theory.â¦
685539
Not everyone is ready to do a complete switch over to the new Intel LGA 775 platform quite yet and perhaps for good reason. Should you decided you would like to say take a peek at it without having to &quot;Sell
238177
IDF Fall '04 As Intel prepares to detail its own multi-core chips
18948
Is your microcode reliable as it could be? Intel has released a BIOS patch for Windows machines running Core 2 and Xeon 3000/5000 chips that addresses potential unpredictable system behavior.â¦
86432
Each skinny server houses eight processors. Plug a few together, and voila! A high-performance machine.
511197
A tiny, fully functional, 70-megabit static random access memory computer chip crammed with more than 500 million transistors has been developed by researchers at Intel Corp.
264929
ANALYST NATHAN BROOKWOOD has raised several questions about a technology announcement Intel made last week on Pentium 4 dual core processors and wonders just what technology was under the hood.
706958
The chip unveiled at IDF works, but there are a lot of hurdles to overcome before an 80-core chip shows up in a living room.
763524
Intel unveils prototype of 80-core processor    WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 (Xinhua) -- Intel Corp. announced that it has designed a computer chip prototype which contains as much as 80 cores, performing more than a trillion calculations per second, U.S. media reported on Monday.
310996
Chip maker plans for smaller, faster, less power-hungry processors.
225100
Intel's new laptop dual-core chips don't match their desktop siblings' star performance.
344994
Analysis: Dual- and quad-core systems add power, but customers wonder whether the they're worth the cost.
377547
Montalvo Systems has a multiple-core chip, but not all of the cores are the same. That in part explains why investors have put money into it.
164110
A small, fully functional, 70-megabit static random access memory computer chip crammed with more than 500,000,000 transistors has been developed by researchers at Intel Corp.
512501
AMD Opteron servers prove more power-efficient than Xeon-powered servers in tests.
412582
(InfoWorld) - Following their march from standard processors to dual-core and quad-core designs in 2006, Intel researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs more than a teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) while using less electricity than a modern desktop PC chip. First described by Intel executivesÂ at a September trade show, the chip fits 80 cores onto a 275-square millimeter, fingernail-size chip and draws only 62 watts of power -- less than many modern desktop chips. The company has no plans to bring this "teraflops research chip" to market, but is using it to test new technologies such as high-bandwidth interconnects, energy management techniques, and a tile design method to build multicore chips, said Jerry Bautista, director of Intel's tera-scale research program. He spoke in a conference call with reporters on Friday before presenting technical details of the research at the ISSCC (Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference) trade show in San Francisco. Intel engineers are also using the chip to explore new forms of tera-scale computing, in which future users could process terabytes of data on their desktops to perform real-time speech recognition, multimedia data mining, photo-realistic gaming and artificial intelligence. Until now, that degree of computing performance has been available only to scientists and academics using machines like ASCI Red, the teraflops supercomputer built by Intel and its partners in 1996 for U.S. government researchers at Sandia National Labs, near Albuquerque, New Mexico. That system handled a comparable amount of computing as the new chip, but demanded an enormous 500 kilowatts of power and 500 kilowatts of cooling to run its nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro chips. Shrunk onto a single chip, that power would allow average consumers to use their PCs in new ways. They could use improved search functions on the vast amounts of digital media stored on home desktops, searching large photo archives for specific attributes such as all the shots where a certain person is smiling, or where that person is posing with a friend, Bautista said. Running at 3.16GHz, the new chip achieves 1.01 teraflops of computation -- an efficiency of 16 gigaflops per watt. It can run even faster, but loses efficiency at higher speeds, performing at 1.63 teraflops at 5.1 GHz and 1.81 teraflops at 5.7 GHz. The processor saves power by shunting idle cores into sleep mode, then instantly turning them on as they're needed. Each modular tile has its own router built alongside the core, creating a "network on a chip." Despite using such an efficient grid, the researchers found they could actually hurt performance by adding too many cores. Performance scaled up directly from two cores to four, eight and 16. But they found that computing performance began to drop with 32 and 64 cores. "If we simply added more than 16 cores, we would get diminishing returns, because the threads and data traffic would not be used properly, so the cores get in the way of each other. It's like having too many cooks in the kitchen," said Bautista. To solve the problem on the new chip, they used a hardware-based thread scheduler and faster on-chip memory caches, optimizing the way data flows from memory into each core. To improve the design, Intel researchers plan to add a layer of "3D stacked memory" under the chip to minimize the time and power required to feed the cores with data. Next, they will create a mega-chip that uses general purpose cores instead of the floating-point units used in the current design.