Intel Demos 48-Core Chip with Eye Toward Artifical Intelligence
Intel Demos 48-Core Chip with Eye Toward Artifical Intelligence
Posted 12/02/2009 at 4:14pm
| by Paul Lilly
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Intel, who at some point in the not-too-distant future will show socket 1366 owners some love with a 6-core processor, just got through demonstrating a 48-core processor it hopes will usher in a new era of computing with PCs powerful enough to emulate human traits. Did we really say 48 cores? Excuse us while we change our underpants.
Before you soil yours as well, it's important to understand that the cores aren't barn burners likes today's desktop Core i7 chips are. Instead, the 1.3 billion transistor processor, called Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is the successor generation to the 80-core "Polaris" processor and has more in common with a low end Atom part than a desktop Nehalem.
Unlike Polaris, however, Intel's 48-core chip can run the same standard software as Intel's x86 CPUs. And while each core doesn't pack a punch by itself, combining 48 of them makes it a pretty powerful chip.
"The machine will be capable of understanding the world around them much as humans do," Justin Rattner, Intel CTO, said at a press event. "They will see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities, and will demand as a result very (powerful) computing capability."
This isn't something you'll see on the desktop, but for you Folding fanatics, could you imagine pairing this chip with an upcoming Fermi graphics card or three? Oops, there goes another pair of briefs.
Image Credit: Intel
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phantomgett
December 03, 2009 at 11:38am
It's still an interesting piece of news. He mentioned folding. Consider 3 fermi cards at like $12,000 a pop, plus this chip, on a brand new board that supports it, and a PSU that can handle it... You're talking more than $40,000 dollars for a personal computer.
Which, unless you're a Stanford Staff member, who helped mastermind the project, or someone who can write the whole thing off as "tax-deductible-mission-of-charity", then I can't see shelling out for this...
Also, great point on the Human Brain have much more parrallel processing capabilities, I actually didn't know that before you said it. It got me wondering though, if you could link enough of the new Fermi-CoProcessor-GPUs together, could you eventually match the co-processing power?
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Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity
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johnny3144
December 03, 2009 at 9:46am
[quote=noctrl]Skynet became self-aware at 2:14 A.M. EDT August 29, 1997... Somebody had to say it. :P[/quote]
is this a new theory for 2012?
lien_meat
December 02, 2009 at 11:30pm
Nice and all...but not even close to good enough to emulate brain functionality like they are implying...
Even extremely primative brains do millions of parallel operations at a time. The brain is not fast compared to our silicon, but it is MASSIVELY more parallel...this chip wouldn't be a drop in the bucket to emulating a human brain. You'd need a large cluster of them to even start to aproximate that kind of parallelism.
Mr_Histamine
December 03, 2009 at 12:35pm
That, and the human brain mostly uses chemicals to send information; if they want to reach the processing power of the human brain (without setting their labs on fire), they'll need to further develop chemically based processing.
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Please deposit your pride, life, and other garbage in the receptacles at the back of the theater before you leave. Thanks!
Raskolnn1kov
December 02, 2009 at 7:23pm
CAN IT RUN CRYSIS?
Or maybe it can run FSX maxed out instead...:)
Quakindude
December 02, 2009 at 7:16pm
Paul, you had me chuckling like crazy! Excellently written article on upcoming Intel silicon! Humor should be used in more of the articles written here!
MaximumPC Moderator
***The views I express are my own and do not represent the views of MaximumPC Magazine or Future US.***
NoCtrl
December 02, 2009 at 5:24pm
Skynet became self-aware at 2:14 A.M. EDT August 29, 1997... Somebody had to say it. :P
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