The Era of Tera: Intel Reveals more about 80-core CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 11, 2007 5:44 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Chip
As its name implied, the Teraflops Research Chip is a research vehicle and not a product. Intel has no intentions of ever selling the chip, but technology used within the CPU will definitely see the light of day in future Intel chip designs.
The Teraflops chip is built on Intel's 65nm process and features a modest, by today's standards, 100M transistors on a 275mm^2 die. As a reference point, Intel's Core 2 Duo, also built on a 65nm process, features 291M transistors on a 143mm^2 die. The reason the Teraflops chip is large given its relatively low transistor count is that there's very little memory on the chip itself, whereas around half of Intel's Core 2 is made up of L2 cache. Other than being predominantly logic circuits, the Teraflops chip also has a lot of I/O circuitry on it that can't be miniaturized as well as most other circuits resulting in a larger overall chip size. The chip features 8 metal layers with copper interconnects.
The Teraflops chip is built on a single die composed of 80 independent processor cores, or tiles as Intel is calling them. The tiles are arranged in a rectangle 8 tiles across and 10 tiles down; each tile has a surface area of 3mm^2.
The chip uses a LGA package like Intel's Core 2 and Pentium 4 processors, but features 1248 pins. Of the 1248 pins on the package, 343 of them are used for signaling while the rest are predominantly power and ground.
The chip can operate at a number of speeds depending on its operating voltage, but the minimum clock speed necessary to maintain its teraflop name is 3.13GHz at 1V. At that speed and voltage, the peak performance of the chip with all 80 cores active is 1 teraflop while drawing 98W of power. At 4GHz, the chip can deliver a peak performance of 1.28 TFLOP, pulling 181W at 1.2V. On the low end of the spectrum, the chip can run at 1GHz, consuming 11W and executing a maximum of 310 billion floating point operations per second.
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Navitron - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
In the words of bill gates "No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer." You sound just like him :P Don't bash the technology just because "right now" we don't need it. But what about in 10-20 years, you still think your core 2 duo is gonna cut it in 15 years? Can a IBM 80386 run doom 3? will todays AMD and Intels run -insert game here- 10 years from now.So don't assume just because we don't need it now doesn't mean we wont need it in 3 years.
cscpianoman - Sunday, February 11, 2007 - link
The average consumer might not need it, but large industries will be grabbing at these things faster than you can imagine. Think of health care, for example, the trend is to move towards genetic manipulations/prescreening. These industries want to download a person's entire genetic information, process it, and return it to you with the results of Alzhiemer's, cancer, and heart problems in a matter of minutes. Furthermore, the entertainment industry would love to create more special effects and render them that much faster. I'm sure if they could Pixar would already be placing an order for these. There are hundreds of applications out there that require the power and capability of multi-cores. Sure the consumer may not need it, but the consumer only accounts for less than approx. 5% of what Intel, AMD or whoever makes.mino - Sunday, February 11, 2007 - link
They need it (to sell). Period.Justin Case - Sunday, February 11, 2007 - link
In other words, Intel is doing the same that IBM and AMD (with Cell and Torrenza + Fusion), only with some made-up numbers and more Powerpoint charts. Unless they vastly improve their compilers' paralellization, or come up with a full suite of software optimized for multi-core chips (80? It's hard enough to take full advantage of 4!), this will remain something that "can be done", but which most people will have no use for.joex444 - Sunday, February 11, 2007 - link
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