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Monday, February 12, 2007
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Intel Showcases 80-core Processor
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Intel researchers have developed the world?s first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip not much larger than the size of a finger nail.
This is the result of the company's "Tera-scale computing" research
aimed at delivering Teraflops -- or trillions of calculations per
second --performance for future PCs and servers. Technical details
of the Teraflops research chip will be presented at the annual
Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San
Francisco.
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.
 Intel has no plans to bring this exact chip designed with floating
point cores to market. However, the company?s Tera-scale research
is 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 Teraflops research chip
offered specific insights in new silicon design methodologies,
high-bandwidth interconnects and energy management approaches.
The first time Teraflops performance was achieved was in 1996, on
the ASCI Red Supercomputer built by Intel for the Sandia National
Laboratory. That computer took up more than 2,000 square feet, was
powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed over
500 kilowatts of electricity. Intel?s research chip achieves this
same performance on a multi-core chip.
According to Intel, this 80-core research chip achieves a
teraflops of performance while consuming only 62 watts - less than
many single-core processors today.
Intel used 100 million transistors on the chip, which measures 275 millimeters squared. By comparison, its Core 2 Duo chip uses 291 million transistors and measures 143 millimeters squared. The chip was built using Intel's 65-nanometer manufacturing technology.
The chip features an innovative tile design in which smaller cores
are replicated as "tiles," making it easier to design a chip with
many cores. With Intel?s discovery of new and robust materials to
build future transistors and no immediate end in sight for Moore's
Law, this lays a path to manufacture multi-core processors with
billions of transistors more efficiently in the future.
The Teraflops chip also features a mesh-like "network-on-a-chip"
architecture that allows super-high bandwidth communications
between the cores and is 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, thus 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.
Intel is presenting eight other papers at ISSCC, including one
which will cover the Intel Core micro-architecture and its use
in dual and quad core processors spanning laptops to desktop PCs
and servers, using both 65nm and 45nm process
technologies. Other papers cover such topics as a Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) reader transceiver chip, a low-power cache
for mobile applications and a reconfigurable Viterbi accelerator in
addition to novel circuits for on-die supply resonance suppression,
on-chip phase-noise measurement and adaptive techniques for
variations and aging. |
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