[Info-vax] OT: Intel says 1,000-core processor is possible

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 30-11-2010 16:53, John Wallace wrote:
> On Nov 30, 9:25 pm, Neil Rieck<n.ri... at sympatico.ca>  wrote:
>> Intel says 1,000-core processor is possible
>>
>> http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/intel-says-1000-core-processor-is-p...
>
> Possible and useful are worlds apart here.

Given that the current direction in CPU's are more cores per
CPU, then it are most likely very useful.

> Eliminating cache coherency and using message passing instead sounds
> on the surface a bit like someone re-inventing the Transputer; I
> wonder whether there are any relevant patents still in force. TCP/IP
> for the inter-core link? I suppose it has a well known API, often well
> known for too many buffer copies...

Given that the two most popular programming environments on Intel
CPU's has memory models that does not require cache coherency, then
the app impact is not big. The HW engineers and the VM SW engineers
will have a few challenges.

Note that the messaging is HW. They just used TCP/IP to get something
that the software did support.

> There are very very few problem domains where massive parallelisation
> turns out to actually be useful, outside 'the cloud'.

When this technology hist the street then most of server computing
will probably be cloud based (huge public clouds or company private
clouds), so outside the cloud is not where the money will be.

Arne