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Bah! Intel and AMD :P
- Thread starter ethan
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Associate
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- 19 Jun 2007
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which requires a lot of power (it says in the video "each cable provides 50 amps") and also needs a phase change unit:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=TAKG0UvtzpE
at the end it says "teraflops performance at 62 watts" though :\ unless thats per core, i dont understand it.
Tilera isnt a 'general' purpose CPU though, its designed to be used for specific fuctions. Sun's Niagra2 is able to process 64 threads across 8 cores on a single chip, and its very good at it, but again it prefers simple applications like Apache, SQL servers etc..
Comparing Sun's Niagra's with Tilera is probably more valid, although Niagra can still be used as a fairly powerfull general purpose CPU, as it runs the industry standard 'Sparc' command set.
On the other side of the fence, there is the X86 command set, which is a complex instruction set, giving very flexible programming options, uses somewhat less man hours to produce a fairly efficient program, and is well known to many programmers. The downside, is the processors themselves are a lot more complex, requiring millions of transistors, so they are larger, and its harder to increase the number of cores. But they do a pretty good job as 'general purpose' computers. Nehelem will be an 8 core, 16 thread processor, and it's likely to be a long time before most programs can make full use of a chip like that.
Comparing Sun's Niagra's with Tilera is probably more valid, although Niagra can still be used as a fairly powerfull general purpose CPU, as it runs the industry standard 'Sparc' command set.
On the other side of the fence, there is the X86 command set, which is a complex instruction set, giving very flexible programming options, uses somewhat less man hours to produce a fairly efficient program, and is well known to many programmers. The downside, is the processors themselves are a lot more complex, requiring millions of transistors, so they are larger, and its harder to increase the number of cores. But they do a pretty good job as 'general purpose' computers. Nehelem will be an 8 core, 16 thread processor, and it's likely to be a long time before most programs can make full use of a chip like that.
I believe prod was mooted as five years out, which is as much as to say "we can", I suppose. Market conditions, tech conditions 5+ years from now..??? I'd like 5 minutes on that crystal ball
.The intel project is well, an experiment, much of it owing to utilizing a couple of different new technologies for the desktop processing:
Multilayer chips, being able to stack cores in layers, instead of just laying them out horizontally
A "network" architecture, like the Tilera utilizing a router/client kind of communication between the cores.
Plus a million other things, it's primarily for the heck of it, to try out these technologies, and yep, because they can, and one of these technologies might prove to be the greatest thing ever, and could start a revolution in chip-design, or maybe not.
Both AMD & Intel has the money and manpower to play around with this stuff.
Multilayer chips, being able to stack cores in layers, instead of just laying them out horizontally
A "network" architecture, like the Tilera utilizing a router/client kind of communication between the cores.
Plus a million other things, it's primarily for the heck of it, to try out these technologies, and yep, because they can, and one of these technologies might prove to be the greatest thing ever, and could start a revolution in chip-design, or maybe not.
Both AMD & Intel has the money and manpower to play around with this stuff.