Intel’s researchers have developed the world’s first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip. Its technical details will be presented at the annual Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco, the Corporation announced.
The 80-core chip is claimed to be not much larger than the size of a finger nail while consuming only 62 watts - less than many single-core processors today. This is the result of the company’s ‘Tera-scale computing’ research aimed at delivering Teraflop - or trillions of calculations per second - performance for future PCs and servers.
“Tera-scale performance, and the ability to move terabytes of data, will play a pivotal role in future computers with ubiquitous access to the Internet by powering new applications for education and collaboration, as well as enabling the rise of high-definition entertainment on PCs, servers and handheld devices. For example, artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition - once deemed as science fiction in Star Trek shows - could become everyday realities,” Intel says.
Intel has no plans to bring this exact chip designed with floating point cores to market. However, the company’s Tera-scale research is instrumental in investigating new innovations in individual or specialized processor or core functions, the types of chip-to-chip and chip-to-computer interconnects required to best move data and most importantly, how software will need to be designed to best leverage multiple processor cores. This Teraflop research chip offered specific insights in new silicon design methodologies, high-bandwidth interconnects and energy management approaches.
The Teraflop chip also features a mesh-like “network-on-a-chip” architecture allowing super high bandwidth communications between the cores, and capable of moving Terabits of data per second inside the chip. The research also investigated methods to power cores on and off independently, so only the ones needed to complete a task are used, providing more energy efficiency.
Further Tera-scale research will focus on the addition of 3-D stacked memory to the chip as well as developing more sophisticated research prototypes with many general-purpose Intel Architecture-based cores. Today, the Intel Tera-scale Computing Research Program has over 100 projects underway that explore other architectural, software and system design challenges, according to chip manufacturer.
Contrary to Intel’s concept of chip with large number of identical cores, AMD’s plans include Accelerated Processing Units, the multi-core chips that include a mix of processor cores and other dedicated cores. The dedicated cores could be used for separate physics processing or audio/video encoding for example. According to the reports, APUs may bring specific tailored processors in the future, such as office, gaming or CAD CPUs.
