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Scientists squeeze more than 1,000 cores on to computer chip
- mxavier 16y agoConsidering this is coming from the University of Glasgow, I wonder what sort of cool stuff they might be doing with this technology with Haskell/GHC.
- bioh42_2 16y agoI am the only one who sees the growing number or cores as proof that transistor density growth is sigmoid and not geometric? At least, not anymore. The fact that we have entered the sigmoid stage is kind of depressing.
- jbri 16y agoNot at all. Transistor density keeps marching on - it's clock rates that have stagnated, and they did so quite a while ago. So we're getting more and more transistors on a chip, but it's prohibitively expensive in terms of power consumption and other tradeoffs to use them to make individual execution units faster. The solution? Use those extra transistors to cram more cores and more cache on the die.
- bioh42_2 16y agoYes, it is marching on, but not nearly as fast as it used to. And it will continue to slow down. Do you disagree?
- ssp 16y agoIt's still as exponential as ever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transistor_Count_and_Moore%27s_Law_-_2008.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transistor_Count_and_Moore... It will come to an end at some point of course.
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- Rusky 16y agoIn simple terms, this isn't really a 1000 core processor in the traditional sense, this is a reprogrammable GPU (which is close enough that the title makes sense). That's not necessarily either better or worse, but the title is a little sensational. The really interesting part is at the end of the article when they quote the researchers saying "This is very early proof-of-concept work where we’re trying to demonstrate a convenient way to program FPGAs so that their potential to provide very fast processing power could be used much more widely in future computing and electronics." A more convenient way to program FPGAs goes along with things like CUDA/OpenCL to make massive data parallelism more accessible.
- srean 16y agoNot quite the 1,000 cores but with GreenArrays you can get 144 cores on a square cm for $20 a piece. They can do only integer math in hardware though. Comes with a free forth based SDK. Wish I knew enough embedded systems to play with this toy.
- srean 16y agoOops forgot the link http://www.greenarraychips.com/index.html http://www.greenarraychips.com/index.html