DJSPIN80

December 28, 2010 at 7:48am

1,000 cores seem so excessive, it's ridiculous.

x86 needs to go and more RISC architectures need to take its place.  Even with the combined CISC/RISC implementations of modern x86 chips, there are simply not enough registers on the CPU itself.  Widening the ISA would definitely help and allowing for more 'mixed' architectures would benefit as well.

BTW, this isn't the same as a GPU.  GPU's are generally vector processors, they're not general processors.  GPU's are good when you're applying large calculations on data (i.e., 3D or financial calculations) because they tend to follow the SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) principle.  GPU's excel at it because their architecture is simple enough that they don't have to account for too much branching, hence they can do 1,000 cores on a single die because each core is really not all that complex.

Anyways, a widened ISA will help.  However, programmers need to get in on the act too (speaking as a software engineer, myself).  There's really not a whole lot of applications right now that require large scale computing on any level.  However, what this can help with is innovating rich UI experiences; so UI's that are functional and friendly.  

fellowleo

December 27, 2010 at 6:22pm

This is pretty much what a supercomputer does. How many of us really need one? As for the industries that do need one, they have enough trouble feeding power and cooling the massive servers that are out there now. Does this guy has any concept how much power and in turn cooling something like this is going to need?

someuid

December 27, 2010 at 3:52pm

"Message-passing applications tend to scale at worst as the diameter of the network, which runs roughly as the square root of the number of nodes on the network."

Anyone have any idea what that means?

quickone

December 27, 2010 at 2:03pm

1000 cores? Isn't that called a GPU?  And people were talking about 6Ghz CPUs back in the P4 days, and it turned out that wasn't the way to go so they moved onto cores.  Now we're talking about super high number of cores instead of clocks, I have a felling in 5 years they'll realize that isn't the right path either....

994196003

December 27, 2010 at 11:46am

1000 cores? thats something i would put in my grandmas computer. Come on!

Walnut

December 27, 2010 at 11:20am

1000 cores seems useless when no one can figure out how to make good use out of 4. Higher efficiency and higher clock speed is what we need right now. More cores has been a cop out for the better part of a decade. Come on, Intel.

Also, @MaxPC Staff: the new spam filter seems to work pretty well but this comment form still locks up my tab in Chrome. And spellcheck doesn't work. Neither does right-click. I'm getting most of these problems in FF, too.

the_river

December 27, 2010 at 10:57am

The dawn....it's all over...especially if they make another movie!!