

Scientists squeeze more than 1,000 cores on to computer chip - Husafan
http://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_183814_en.html

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Rusky
In simple terms, this isn't really a 1000 core processor in the traditional
sense, this is a reprogrammable GPU (which is close enough that the title
makes sense). That's not necessarily either better or worse, but the title is
a little sensational.

The really interesting part is at the end of the article when they quote the
researchers saying "This is very early proof-of-concept work where we’re
trying to demonstrate a convenient way to program FPGAs so that their
potential to provide very fast processing power could be used much more widely
in future computing and electronics." A more convenient way to program FPGAs
goes along with things like CUDA/OpenCL to make massive data parallelism more
accessible.

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srean
Not quite the 1,000 cores but with GreenArrays you can get 144 cores on a
square cm for $20 a piece. They can do only integer math in hardware though.
Comes with a free forth based SDK.

Wish I knew enough embedded systems to play with this toy.

~~~
srean
Oops forgot the link <http://www.greenarraychips.com/index.html>

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bioh42_2
I am the only one who sees the growing number or cores as proof that
transistor density growth is sigmoid and not geometric? At least, not anymore.

The fact that we have entered the sigmoid stage is kind of depressing.

~~~
jbri
Not at all. Transistor density keeps marching on - it's _clock rates_ that
have stagnated, and they did so quite a while ago.

So we're getting more and more transistors on a chip, but it's prohibitively
expensive in terms of power consumption and other tradeoffs to use them to
make individual execution units faster. The solution? Use those extra
transistors to cram more cores and more cache on the die.

~~~
bioh42_2
Yes, it is marching on, but not nearly as fast as it used to. And it will
continue to slow down. Do you disagree?

~~~
ssp
It's still as exponential as ever:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transistor_Count_and_Moore...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transistor_Count_and_Moore%27s_Law_-_2008.svg)

It will come to an end at some point of course.

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mxavier
Considering this is coming from the University of Glasgow, I wonder what sort
of cool stuff they might be doing with this technology with Haskell/GHC.

