Just when you thought your 6-core chip was the baddest processor on the planet, Intel goes and announces plans to ship PCs equipped with an experimental 48-core CPU to a handful of lucky researchers sometime by the end of the second quarter.
Well, AMD 12-core Opteron seems a bit closer to general availability. On the other hand, bulk price per processor seems to be $1200 – and bulk means 1000 processors or so.
I think 48 cores is probably 36 more than can be used.
I bought a iCore 7 recently, which with hyperthreading has 8 cores. It is very rare to get more than 3 busy at one time. Most software is single threaded, and most applications rely on reading, processing, and saving. Multiple threads will ensure that caches are kept full but ultimately the process becomes I/O bound. We need a mixture of better disk drives and file systems.
The one time I managed to make the system fly was running multiple instances of a password search program - all memory, no I/O.
From a software development side I am going to purchase Visual Studio 2010 that has some rather better tools for parallel programming. It will be interesting to see if such tools help create more multithreaded programs.
I max out all 4 cores (8 threads) of my Core i7 when I'm indexing with FTK3, or doing compression. MS is looking at re-doing the Windows kernel to automatically make use of multiple cores without the 3rd party developers having to specifically code for it since CPU power increases seem destined to be based on more cores rather than faster clocks.
Yeal, I also was reading up on teh i-core line of processors. i3 is dual, i5 was dual and quad, and i7 came dual, quad, and 8 cores. I still think that we are a ways away from 48-core processors.
Not so sure - Intel's a bit slow, but I've had an 8 ( 1 PPE & 7 SPE ) core Cell Chip in my PS3 for about 5 years …
IBM were working on a 33 core ( 1PPE & 32 SPE ) Cell Chip, but canned it in 2009 - they had packaged 4 Core chips into one piece of silicon, and were reckoning on 1 Tflop from that one chip clearly not commercially viable though sadly -( it would make a hell of a basis for the PS4 😉