Check out this article on an 80-core Intel prototype chip. Mmmm the future looks good my friends. Yes indeedy...

well, it will do once we work out how to take advantage of an 80 core CPU of course [smile]

Can we dub this the "Raycasting Chip"? But honestly, how do you utilize an 80-core chip? Honestly, how do you utilize effectively a multi-core chip? I just never even understood how.

I'm not trying to be too negative, but didn't intel also plan a 100 GHz chip during the P4 heyday?

If 80 cores could be simultaneously used, that would be awesome.

Using current technology, program optimization for 80 cores would be painful, though.

Imagine a RPG with hundreds of NPC's controlled by individual AI.

Imagine a MMORPG server controlling hundreds or thousands of clients (or any server connected to the web).

Imagine computing thousands of matrix transformations for game graphics.

Imagine boinc on steroids. [grin]

bit-tech is about four months late with this news.

Intel Developers Forum roundup: four cores now, 80 cores later.

Quote:
Secondly, Intel's CEO (pictured at right) told the audience that the chipmaker has already built a prototype with 80 processing cores on a single chip that can perform a trillion floating-point operations per second -- that's a teraflop to the layman -- and is aiming to ready commercial versions within five years.

* i read somewhere that this is similar to the cell and not 80 x86 cores, but i can't seem to find it.

here we go:

Intel touts 80-core processors, silicon sandwiches, and lasers

Quote:
The 80-core processor consists of eight simple floating-point cores that each implement a small, stripped-down, non-x86 ISA. These cores are arranged in a tile pattern and connected to each other by means of an on-chip network. Note that these cores are almost certainly in-order, and are certainly less complex than the Cell processor's SPEs. The whole thing is very reminiscent of Sun's Niagara, and in fact I've heard that internally Intel uses their own little water-based metaphor for it; they call it the "sea of cores" approach.

[Edited by - gumpy macdrunken on January 22, 2007 5:26:53 PM]

Yea, so it's not like you're programming for 80 individual cores - the CPU does a lot of the legwork in terms of breaking down instructions and handing them out to be processed. If I understand it properly

No rule says all 80 cores have to be running the same process.

Right now I have a movie playing on one monitor, Neverwinter Nights on another, and my usual desktop on this one. Of course that doesn't use up all 80 cores, but it'd significantly lower my load average if each process could get its own core.

I'm probably in something of a minority. Most people probably don't have more than one or two processes vieing for control of the CPU.

I'd imagine the real target of this kind of thing will be the virtualization market. Also, I can imagine a powerful "home media center" running dumb terminals disguised as TVs, radios and games consoles.

Yeh, something like that would be awesome for ray-tracing.

Imagine being able to dole-out packets of rays to more than 70 spare processors and have them just dump the eventuating colour values straight into the frame-buffer? Of course, there'd be issues with keeping them fed, simulateous memory-reads, and all sorts of other stuff that I'm not smart-enough to comprehend [grin]. If they all had decent floating-point ALUs and decent-sized caches (each, or a big cache they can all read from), something like real-time ray-tracing on modern scenes might be feasible?