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Intel makes them and you can buy them today, with up to 72 Atom CPU cores, e.g. (1) https://ark.intel.com/products/95830/Intel-Xeon-Phi-Processor-7290-16GB-1_50

Intel makes them and you can buy them today, with up to 72 Atom CPU cores, e.g. (1) https://ark.intel.com/products/95830/Intel-Xeon-Phi-Processor-7290-16GB-1_50-GHz-72-core https://ark.intel.com/products/95830/Intel-Xeon-Phi-Processo... Very niche products. For massively parallel number crunching, GPUs are much better in both performance/watt and performance/dollar. That Xeon Phi 7290 delivers up to 3.45TFlops, costs $3200, and consumes 245W. Compare with GeForce 1080Ti 10.6 TFlops, $700, same 250W. For general purpose software they don’t work particularly well either. Most IO interfaces is serial, SATA, PCI-X, they have very few wires going to CPU. If you’re IO bound and you don’t have enough single-thread performance you’ll struggle to saturate the bandwidth, doable but very hard. Also for general-purpose software latency matters. Namely, input to screen latency for desktops and mobiles, or request to response latency for servers. Get Windows or Android tablet with Intel Atom Z8300 (available for $80-100), and see how it performs, it has 4 very similar cores (minus AVX-512), and frequencies are very similar, too.

a1369209993 8y ago
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-technical-resources.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon... shows at least six volumes of datasheets, and I still haven't found a instruction set refence. I have found https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-phi-processor-x200-product-family-vol-2-datasheet.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon... (helpfully labeled "Datasheet, volume 2", rather than anything related to it's contents) which describes a subset of the aformentioned ten thousand random control registers. So no, Intel does not make [simple cores], it makes heaping piles of shit complete with malware ("Intel® Management Engine") buried at D22:F0 on a interal PCI bus. It isn't simple, it's designed to be incorrect (and even the parts that are supposed to be correct aren't), and I'm not surprised it fails on fast as well.
- Const-me 8y ago
  > I still haven't found a instruction set reference. X86-64, SSE, AVX, AVX-512, AES-NI, etc. Their key selling point is software compatibility. > Intel does not make [simple cores] The cores are quite simple by today’s standards; otherwise Intel wouldn’t be able to pack 72 of them on a single chip. IME is unrelated to the cores, it’s a separate piece of silicon. But if you don’t like the IME and don’t need backward compatibility with x86, maybe you’ll like this: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qualcomm-centriq-2400-processor https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qualcomm-centriq-2400-proc... But again, performance benefits of the architecture (48 simple cores) is questionable, GPUs are way faster for parallelizable number crunching, and you need single thread performance for almost everything else.
  - a1369209993 8y ago
    > X86-64, [etc] So it has the ten thousand x86 and x64 registers in addition to the ten thousand ?PCI registers? > The cores are quite simple by today's standards That's my point; today's CPUs don't have "ultra-simple" as a option (at modern feature densities). > IME is unrelated to the cores Fair point, I probably should have added "and doesn't have technicalities like builtin malware" to my original post. > https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qualcomm-centriq-2400-processor https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qualcomm-centriq-2400-proc... This looks interesting, although I'll need to research a bit more (and "SOC - Features - Integrated management controller" isn't encouraging). Thanks!

a1369209993 8y ago

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-technical-resources.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon... shows at least six volumes of datasheets, and I still haven't found a instruction set refence. I have found https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-phi-processor-x200-product-family-vol-2-datasheet.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon... (helpfully labeled "Datasheet, volume 2", rather than anything related to it's contents) which describes a subset of the aformentioned ten thousand random control registers. So no, Intel does not make [simple cores], it makes heaping piles of shit complete with malware ("Intel® Management Engine") buried at D22:F0 on a interal PCI bus. It isn't simple, it's designed to be incorrect (and even the parts that are supposed to be correct aren't), and I'm not surprised it fails on fast as well.

Const-me 8y ago
> I still haven't found a instruction set reference. X86-64, SSE, AVX, AVX-512, AES-NI, etc. Their key selling point is software compatibility. > Intel does not make [simple cores] The cores are quite simple by today’s standards; otherwise Intel wouldn’t be able to pack 72 of them on a single chip. IME is unrelated to the cores, it’s a separate piece of silicon. But if you don’t like the IME and don’t need backward compatibility with x86, maybe you’ll like this: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qualcomm-centriq-2400-processor https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qualcomm-centriq-2400-proc... But again, performance benefits of the architecture (48 simple cores) is questionable, GPUs are way faster for parallelizable number crunching, and you need single thread performance for almost everything else.
- a1369209993 8y ago
  > X86-64, [etc] So it has the ten thousand x86 and x64 registers in addition to the ten thousand ?PCI registers? > The cores are quite simple by today's standards That's my point; today's CPUs don't have "ultra-simple" as a option (at modern feature densities). > IME is unrelated to the cores Fair point, I probably should have added "and doesn't have technicalities like builtin malware" to my original post. > https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qualcomm-centriq-2400-processor https://www.qualcomm.com/products/qualcomm-centriq-2400-proc... This looks interesting, although I'll need to research a bit more (and "SOC - Features - Integrated management controller" isn't encouraging). Thanks!