[News] One Tereflop chip (CPU) by Intel

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Chibibar

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15758057

The Knight Corner (exert)
The Knights Corner chip acts as a co-processor - taking over some of the most complicated tasks from the computers central processing unit (CPU).
It packs more than 50 cores - or individual processors - onto a single piece of silicon.
The chip offers "double precision" processing which allows a greater amount of numbers to be represented at one time - resulting in faster calculations and more accurate forecasts.
Intel says the accelerator is also the first server processor to support full integration of the PCI Express 3.0 specification. The technology allows data to be transferred at up to 32 gigabytes per second to compatible devices - twice the speed of the previous generation.

Wow. That is a lot of power :) 32GB per second (naturally nothing on the hard drive level even SSD at this time I do believe SATA is 6GBps)

I guess with this chip and SSD and video card (the article talk about GPU) you could almost have no latency on the PC side (except for input devices and possible actual display on the monitor)
 
strawman

strawman

Back in the day you could buy a math coprocessor for your x86 computer. The 8086/8 had the 8087. The 80286 had the 80287. The 80386 had the 80387. The "coprocessor" for the 80486 was a full 486 with the coprocessor inside the chip enabled (the 80486DX it was called. The 80486SX was the version with the internal coprocessor disabled).

The pentium did away with that madness by including the math coprocessor as part of the internal execution unit - thus speeding up math by an order of magnitude because you didn't have to push math operations onto a separate processor, then get the results later. It all happened inline on the long CPU pipeline.

Over the years new math extensions have been added and SIMD is the new hotness - being able to work on larger numbers, or multiple numbers, in one instruction. In the latest processors you can execute an instruction on a 512 bit piece of data.

Of course, for some operations that's not enough, and for years people have been using GPUs as coprocessors for simulation and scientific research.

This latest processor is, to some degree, a hybrid between a GPU and the intel CPU. It's more generic than a GPU - can execute a wider variety of operations - but is very highly parallel - much more so than current processors.

It's not, however, for home or personal computer use. It's intended for the server market first, and scientific research market second. I'd be surprised if we ever saw it for the consumer market.
 
C

Chibibar

Yea. Of course mutli processor for home wasn't available for some time when it first came out, but I remember have a dual pentium processor (i.e. two CPU slots cards) for my PC :) You know the "uber high end" will try to incorporate these chip and super fast speed peripheral into the home PC.
Of course a lot of the gaming rig is powerful enough to be small servers (which some are!)
 
C

Chibibar

Dave said:
Will it run Crysis on full feature?
Click to expand...
Heh. Is Crysis still the testing bed? ;) I thought there is a new game testing bed by now.

Edit: upon further reflection after what Stienman's post (boy I remember those days. I even remember the 386 daughter board WITH math co-processor) we may see home version of this chip (maybe .5 Tereflop) but I know with Data transfer rate equipment will be in the home. Started off with IDE now we are in SATA who knows what lies in the future.

Maybe in 5 years most games will load in 1 second or less (OS, Game and all)
I know there was a video that someone hook up a tons of SSD drive and boot up Windows, photoshop and godly insane of programs, but maybe in the future without the need of a fire extinguisher nearby ;)
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

I know the Larrabee project was canceled. I still want to see the entire GPU stack get virtualized so that graphics features no longer directly depend on proprietary hardware support. Sort of like LLVM for graphics.

--Patrick
 
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