Because 4 cores is definitely not enough

Intel has created a chip with 80 cores.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/55717.html

With 8 and 16 core systems in the relatively near future, I wonder if this means that the Cell technology will die a quick death. I don't know what advantages the Cell, with it's very limited SPE's, could possibly have over a chip with just as many or more dedicated processors.

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=67332 ;)

This one seems different to me.

Intel have more than one 80 core chip? :/

Whoops, didn't see that other thread. Oh well.

Anyone else think that the Cell technology is dead in the water?

I think one day you could have fish in an aquarium - the fish will be computers - you'd like have some gaming ones and a few internet ones, etc. If one dies then, yes - it will be dead in the water.

Something tells me Puki has already been there, done that...

I can see object oriented environements being cool with massive parallelism, where many many objects can process simultaneously.

Anyone else think those who so desperately want Sony to fail are getting ever more desperate? One minute the Cell is rubbish because it's hard to program and the next minute it's rubbish because it's not nearly hard *enough* to program.

I would have thought using anything more than about a dozen cores for a game would be a nightmare. A core for each subsystem, yes, but how are you going to split a subsystem ( eg: physics ) over multiple cores without creating all manner of mistakes and inaccurate results?

Wasn't the idea of the cell to network all those PS3's together for massive parrallel processing?

Take over the world!

The 80 core chip is a technology test, they dont actually have them.

The Cell also has 8 cores, and judging by the manufacturing problems IBM have had, I doubt Intel are going to have much luck with this. Intel just like the hype. Remember the "Merced" and how it was gonna revolutionize the world?

I don't think Cell was ever that good. It's like they tried to turn a GPU/DSP into a CPU and forgot to make it actually useful as one. It's not like the 8 cores of the Cell are good for running any kind of generic code.

I was thnking along the same lines as Craig. The Cell is going to be limited because it only has one core to act as a thread dispatcher. None of the SPE's have branch prediction or other capabilities that would enable them to function nearly effectively as a general purpose CPU for the majority of code.

Yeah, puki, how many times have YOU been around the block? :D Hehe...

LOL imagine the size of the fan!!!!! :O>

the word freon springs to mind (or mabe liquid nitrogen :)

Intel have dual core.
Windows cant use more than just 2.

We talking unix systems soon and Sun etc..

Imagine the game of Doom4 on that with reallife rendering 8)

Who knows? Maybe the Windows Vienna system will use Quad Core, for all we know. They have a couple of years to see what'll actually be standard by then.

Maybe Windows Vista or XP can only do two cores/cpus, but the Server products can do more. 2003 Enterprise can do 8, while 2003 Datacenter can do 64.

There's also the possibility of using other cores/cpus to run multiple operating systems concurrently.

I don't think most people will need 80 cores for Minesweeper though.

well.. if it's up to MS, we probably will in a few years time... LOL

The future of computer graphics is NOT pumping out more triangles and textures. In fact triangle and textures are facing a point of diminishing returns. The more tri's the more complicated the geometry, lighting and shading become when trying to produce photo-realistic images.

The future of computer graphics lies in realtime ray tracing. It's certainly bound to have some appeal when using 80 processors concurrently.


The article states that the chip only consumes 62 watts of power. Nearly every desktop will manage that amount of power consumption easily.

yeah, i read that after i posted, impressive!

the BBC site also mentions that the cores can power on/off independently.

This 80-cores cpu is only a 'proof-of-concept'. The machine itself is good only for specific works, the only real news is the number of cores on the chip, nor the technology...AMD (better Digital) whit AthlonXP/Opteron developed a similar approach with is HyperTransport Core-To-Core bus; and Athlon is a REAL product not a prototype.
Anyway without a OS & applications capable to manage very well N-cores, this or the future cpu will be useless.

One of the things I thought was cool about the cell processor concept was that at a very low hardware level it could network to other cells even in other machines across networks to create very fast super/grid computer capabilities.

And the 80 cores is really nothing that new, it's just taking an 80-cpu supercomputer and making it smaller. From a programming standpoint nothing has really changed at all. So long as the o/s knows about the cpu's and can allocate threads etc in a multprocessing way, nothing is different.
The only reason this is seemingly exciting is because it's all one one chip and so could be radically cheaper (i presume) and viable for us desktop people. It's only a matter of time, really, since making a single faster cpu has its limits, so it's much easier (as everyone is discovering) to just strap on more of them.

> I don't think most people will need 80
> cores for Minesweeper though.

Might be needed on Vista.