Intel Unveils 80 Core Programmable Processor

// June 30th, 2008 // Technology News

Intel unveiled today an 80-core processor that delivers Teraflop — or trillions of calculations per second –performance on a single chip. Although has no plans to bring this exact chip to market, it believes a similar design could be available on the market five years from now. “Our researchers have achieved a wonderful and key milestone in terms of being able to drive multi-core and parallel computing performance forward,” said Justin R. Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer.

“It points the way to the near future when Teraflop-capable designs will be commonplace and will reshape what we can all expect from our computers and the Internet at home and in the office.”

One of the breakthroughs achieved with this processor is that this 80-core research chip achieves a teraflop of performance while consuming only 62 watts – less than many single-core processors today, and way less than the ASCI Red Supercomputer built by Intel for the Sandia National Laboratory back in 1996. That computer took up more than 2000 square feet, was powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed over 500 kilowatts of electricity.

This Intel teraflop research chip achieves is not much larger than the size of a finger nail.

Intel also revealed that this 80-core processor features an innovative tile design in which smaller cores are replicated as “tiles,” making it easier to design a chip with many cores.

The Teraflop chip also features a mesh-like “network-on-a-chip” architecture allowing super high bandwidth communications between the cores, and capable of moving Terabits of data per second inside the chip. The research also investigated methods to power cores on and off independently, so only the ones needed to complete a task are used, providing more energy efficiency.

Obviously, this processor can only be useful if there’s software that can take advantage of it. Programmers are starting to take advantage of multithreading so it will take a while for applications to learn how to use all this computational power.

In the near future, Intel will focus on the addition of 3-D stacked memory to the chip as well as developing more sophisticated research prototypes with many general-purpose Intel Architecture-based cores.