Mega Core CPU's / Future of multi-core CPU's

[IdeaStormer]

For those who haven't heard a 100 core cpu is on the way, but not from Intel nor AMD. A new player emerges, Tilera (not really new but new to most).

A good read on the mega core cpu and its contraints, limits, pro's and con's : http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/mit-genius-stu/

Yea, maybe not coming to your desktop tomorrow but eventually!

[christoi]

I really don't see this as a new concept, nor would it be coming to the desktop anytime soon, if at all. Throwing in more cores is definitely a difficult task given various issues that emerge from the production and such, but it's been done before and as the article says, Intel's been working on it with the experimental 48-core unit.

The thing is, these units are aimed at servers, warehouse computing and such. In such cases there are a bunch of individual processors which are all independent of each other, as each user in a server may access the site. In that case it doesn't matter what one user is doing to another, so each core acts individually. Creating such a system is consequently straightforward, just see which cores aren't being utilized, then send the incoming processes there. By increasing cores you can effectively decrease the number of physical systems and processors, which theoretically should yield better power consumption and performance.

With desktops however, there typically isn't a lot of tasks that are simultaneously going on, at least tasks that don't stress the hardware too much. Even in the most extreme cases, you might have a video rendering and a game running, perhaps along with some other light applications like a music player and such. In that case, you don't see much benefit from having a 100-core CPU, provided each application doesn't utilize more than 2-4 cores.

Of course software programmers could optimize it to do so, but threading is a difficult and time consuming task, even with the current system of using a couple of cores, it takes a lot of development to evenly distribute the workload amount threads. With something like rendering you can allocate specific frames to different cores provided they require different computations, but it doesn't work with a game and such. That's mainly why there's few CPU's that are more than a quad-core, there's just too little need for it. Increasing instruction-level parallelism is far more beneficial, as Intel is doing.

The development is indeed interesting though, it'll be interesting to see how Tilera (and the shift as a whole) may influence the enterprise market over the next few years.

[Art Vandelay]

Isn't IBM already making a CPU with more than 500 cores that costs half a million dollars?

[ericlee30]

Finally Tilera will come out with it :) YAY, I remember back in 2006 they were talking about making this CPU and it is finally around the corner

[Eric1024]

It's not x86 so it doesn't really matter for the enthusiast market. Yes, there will be some cool stuff that gets done with it that you might read about, but it doesn't have that many practical applications simply due to its architecture.

[Bob]

meh, I would rather have a 3.0GHz GPU

[IdeaStormer]

Mega core CPU's is the way to go, it can do so much more and much more efficiently than today's handful of core CPU's. Sticking to a small number of core's is very limiting, imagine if you only used a few neurons of your brain to do your day to day tasks. The mega core CPU's will benefit all, sure it will take sometime to get all the programing down but man it will dominate everything, with Neural Network programing you'll be blown away at what the future mega core CPU's will end up doing for you.

[TheIceCreamMan]

Interesting. It will probably cost a shitload tho...

[bradscoolio]

The human brain is very slow, equivalent of 25 khz, but is MASSIVELY parallel! So I think if there is a direction for cpu's to go it's this one.

[MsTrMind]

Why would you want a 100 core CPU? :p

Aren't things fast enough already? :p

[dgtL]

I wonder how Anant Agarwal is dealing with the memory bandwidth and processor memory bus.

[Agons]

dont really see how this will work, how can you use all 100 cores?!?!?! and the laws of diminishing returns!

[IdeaStormer]

dont really see how this will work' date=' how can you use all 100 cores?!?!?! and the laws of diminishing returns! [/quote']

Well if you are running a simple program for your own use, yes there is no need for 100 cores, BUT! If you are running the future of computing and doing pretty much everything at the same time and then also doing new things as well then you'll max out the 100 cores pretty fast, assuming your code can parallel-ize. Just look at smart phones, one core then two now four and you can bet a lot of your hard earned money that it will got to 8 in the short term. Its just a phone why do people need two or four cores? Because you want to do more on the stinking device because you can do more than one thing at a time so you want your computing devices to do more as well at the same time. Then you extrapolate that to really doing what you want, like watch the LTT livestream, backup your system, optimize a game, look for that one file you can't find, tag all your MP3's with new keywords, convert that video you have to a new format, continue to download that torrent, and the list goes on. It can all happen on the same machine at the same time, not later at night after you're done with the heavy stuff you need right away.

Its coming, don't close your eyes because you'll miss the coolest thing to happen to general computing to come.