[squeak-dev] Prepare for Thousands of Cores --- oh my Chip - it's full of cores!

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Sat Jul 5 18:35:18 UTC 2008


2008/7/5 Peter William Lount <peter at smalltalk.org>:
> Philippe Marschall wrote:
>
> 2008/7/5, Peter William Lount <peter at smalltalk.org>:
>
>
> Hi,
>
>  Intel among others such as Tilera and NVidia are telling us - yes us
> smalltalkers - to prepare for tens, hundreds and thousands of cores on a
> single chip. It's up to us to bring this power to our end users - and
> ourselves too!
>
>
> The same Intel that has told us that the future will be IA64 / EPIC?
> The same Intel that has promised us 20 Gigahurtz today? The same Intel
> that tried to sell us RAMBUST? The same Intel that builds SSE into
> it's processors to make the Internet faster?
>
> Cheers
> Philippe
>
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> Yeah, the Itanium. An awesome chip architecture with an incredible
> instruction set. Gotta love it and it's doomed marketing.
>
> Yes, that Intel who showed an 80 core research chip last year.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teraflops_Research_Chip
> http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/06/21/intel-shows-off-2-tflops-processor
> http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1449.htm
>
> Yes, that Intel that is bringing out this little wonder.
> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080205-small-wonder-inside-intels-silverthorne-ultramobile-cpu.html
>
> Intel isn't the only vendor up to the N-Core game. In fact they are getting
> beaten down hard by all the other contenders for the thrown. Hard.
>
> Yes, Multi-core from the companies listed here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_(computing)
>
> Yes, that Tilera. They have 20 and Tile-64 core chips now, with 128 cores in
> the works. They have indicated that they plan up to 4096 with their
> technology.
> http://www.Tilera.com
>
> Yes, that NVidia who is already delivering tons of boards with massive
> numbers of GPGPUs. I have a couple of these boards already.
> http://www.NVidia.com
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_200_Series
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Tesla
> http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/03/nvidia-said-to-be-dropping-geforce-gtx-280-price-in-response-to/
>
> Yes, AMD and Intel who announced 8 core mainstream chips for next year.
>
> Yes, AMD (ATI) who announced this awesome speed beastie: 4870 X2 (RV770XT)
> cards. 800+ stream processing units!
> http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/03/amd-radeon-hd-4870-x2-images-leaked-rumored-for-august-release/
> http://ati.amd.com/products/Radeonhd4800/specs.html
>
> Yes, IBM who makes the 9 core cell processor chip.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)
>
> Yes, Apple who just bought P.A. Semi.
> http://gizmodo.com/382929/apple-buys-itself-a-little-chip-company-known-for-super-efficient-processors
>
>
> These are not your or your fathers Transputer, most of these are real N-core
> processors available now.
>
> Looking at the cpu power available to us and comparing it with the software
> that is available one can't but be either sad or highly motivated to make
> use of the powerful chips to make much better software. Heck we're still
> programming with words! What ever happened to visual programming? We still
> have macosx and windows and ick linux and unix as the best of the breed
> systems? Ick. Sure I use them all but come on... we can and must do
> better...
>
> Cheers,
>
> Peter
>

I suppose Philippe meant that they don't always deliver what they telling about.
But it looks like that paradigm shift from single core to multi core
is inevitable. Building chip running 1Ghz with 20 processing units is
now more effective than building single-core chip which can run at
20GHz frequency.

SMP architectures available on desktop/server market for more than 10
years. And with new technological processes it became possible to fit
2 or more cores in single chip (using same area). CPUs already too
complex comparing to old 80's - multi-level caches, branch prediction,
parallel instructions etc etc. And putting even more cache , tricky
optimizations can't fill whole chip area. Of course you can put 1Gb
cache on chip. But this will be a waste of chip space and this chip
will have very bad processing power/power consumption ratio.

-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.



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