Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Tech Link (Industry): 32-Core Processors: Intel Reaches For (The) Sun

Now, this is just too much for me. First, there was Hyperthreading, a virtual CPU for single-core Chipzilla CPU. Second, came the full blown core processor. Third, dual core with Hyperthreading for that four virtual threads. In the future, there will be four cores. Four cores already makes my head spin, too much core, I don't know what application I am going to run anymore. But I guess this gives me an excuse to use VT better on my machines, and maybe run a cluster of Win2k3-based system on a single machine just for the heck of it. But no, this is not enough, Chipzilla went out of their way, the number of cores just isn't enough! Expand for more...

Intel is of rolling out its Core 2 micro-architecture now. The Xeon 5100 server processor aka Woodcrest was released only weeks ago, Core 2 Duo for the desktop (Conroe) is expected on July 27th and the mobile version Merom will follow only weeks later. The next milestone is quad-core processors, which the firm will produce by fitting two Woodcrest dual cores inside a physical processor package (Clovertown). You may have realized that there is a product development pattern behind recent and upcoming Intel multi core processor releases. Amazingly enough, Intel has been studying Sun's UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) to come up with a radical processor redesign for 2010 that could perform 16 times faster than Woodcrest. This is no marketing blurb, guys; this is technical intelligence from within the Borg collective.

Source:THG

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