
Intel launches first 6-core x86 microprocessor - prakash
http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=14759725
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ars
If you're going to read this, read it here:
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10041308-64.html>

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mattmaroon
Why? Still most of my 4 cores remain idle.

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albertcardona
I have mine pegged to max more than 30% of the time. Running simulations,
stitching images, extracting 3D volumes.

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mattmaroon
Neat. Simulations of what?

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albertcardona
Viral populations in competition:
<http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~acardona/movies/0001_0250.mp4>

Registering image tiles to make montages also takes forever, and it's very
parallelizable: <http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~acardona/movies/48.avi>

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albertcardona
In a recent conference talk by John Shalf in Stockholm (see
[http://neuroinformatics2008.org/program-
new/workshops/future...](http://neuroinformatics2008.org/program-
new/workshops/future-hardware-challenges/future-hardware-challenges-to-
scientific-computing#john-shalf) ), the monster was set on the table: chip
companies are simplifying chips by reducing their clock speed (thus removing
lots of now superfluous prebuffering and synchronization adjacent electronics)
and tiling them to the hundreds and even thousands.

We are not far away from the 10,000 core chip. Say 3 years? Very hard to
guess.

An important point of the talk: he explained how the chip industry ignored
accademia as long as it could just increase clock speed to achieve better
performance. But now, in the parallelization mess, they are comming back for
ideas on how to make efficient use of the cores for compilers (which,
according to John, are currently failing at exploiting multicores) and for
software in general.

[John calls this situation the "manycore", as opposed to the current
"multicore"]

~~~
anamax
They "ignored academia" because general purpose parallelism has been 5-10
years away since at least 1960.

Moreover, a single fast processor has significant advantages over lots of slow
processors. Amdahl's law still applies, as do some rather nasty (academic)
results about the costs of communication. (Bisection bandwidth anyone?)

FWIW, the "128 Z-80s on a bus" thing has been done.

