thekiller
04-08-2010, 11:19 AM
And i was shocked to hear there were octo-core processors...
Forget dual-core and quad-core processors: A semiconductor company promises to pack 100 cores into a processor that can be used in applications that require hefty computing punch, like video conferencing, wireless base stations and networking. By comparison, Intel’s latest chips are expected to have just eight cores.
“This is a general-purpose chip that can run off-the-shelf programs almost unmodified,” says Anant Agarwal, chief technical officer of Tilera, the company that is making the 100-core chip. “And we can do that while offering at least four times the compute performance of an Intel Nehalem-Ex, while burning a third of the power as a Nehalem.”
The 100-core processor, fabricated using 40-nanometer technology, is expected to be available early next year.
In a bid to beat Moore’s law (which states number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years), chip makers are trying to either increase clock speed or add more cores to a processor. But cranking up the clock speed has its limitations, says Will Strauss, principal analyst with research and consulting firm Forward Concepts.
“You can’t just keep increasing the clock speed so the only way to expand processor power is to increase the number of cores, which is what everyone is trying to do now,” he says. “It’s the direction of the future.”
In fact, Intel’s research labs are already working on a similar idea. Last year, Intel showed a prototype of a 80-core processor. The company has promised to bring that to consumers in about five years.
Tilera, a start-up that was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, started in 2007. It says its product will be available in the next few months, which means the company, if successful, will have gone from zero to shipping a powerful chip in just about three years — a very fast time frame in the semiconductor world. That’s because it has created a chip architecture that removes the challenges present in Intel’s x86 design.
Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/10/tilera-100-cores/#ixzz0kWCcaOsO
Forget dual-core and quad-core processors: A semiconductor company promises to pack 100 cores into a processor that can be used in applications that require hefty computing punch, like video conferencing, wireless base stations and networking. By comparison, Intel’s latest chips are expected to have just eight cores.
“This is a general-purpose chip that can run off-the-shelf programs almost unmodified,” says Anant Agarwal, chief technical officer of Tilera, the company that is making the 100-core chip. “And we can do that while offering at least four times the compute performance of an Intel Nehalem-Ex, while burning a third of the power as a Nehalem.”
The 100-core processor, fabricated using 40-nanometer technology, is expected to be available early next year.
In a bid to beat Moore’s law (which states number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years), chip makers are trying to either increase clock speed or add more cores to a processor. But cranking up the clock speed has its limitations, says Will Strauss, principal analyst with research and consulting firm Forward Concepts.
“You can’t just keep increasing the clock speed so the only way to expand processor power is to increase the number of cores, which is what everyone is trying to do now,” he says. “It’s the direction of the future.”
In fact, Intel’s research labs are already working on a similar idea. Last year, Intel showed a prototype of a 80-core processor. The company has promised to bring that to consumers in about five years.
Tilera, a start-up that was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, started in 2007. It says its product will be available in the next few months, which means the company, if successful, will have gone from zero to shipping a powerful chip in just about three years — a very fast time frame in the semiconductor world. That’s because it has created a chip architecture that removes the challenges present in Intel’s x86 design.
Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/10/tilera-100-cores/#ixzz0kWCcaOsO