48 core processor

[garrettroyce]

So yeah, I thought this needed to be shared:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8392392.stm

[stpvoice]

Wow! That's awesome. My dual core looks even more rubbish now. These things are getting smaller...and better.

[Awesomexr]

That's amazing, 48 cores, blimey. :O

[ramsankar]

Phew !

[Mr. DOS]

The big problem now is to convince programmers that yes, no really, properly multi-threaded applications really are the way to go. Even a lot of current supposedly "multi-core utilizing" applications make use of just two cores.

--- Mr. DOS

[diabolo]

first half of 2010. I think im gonna hold off buying a new computer for a while.
=) thanks for the info

[ah-blabla]

The big problem now is to convince programmers that yes, no really, properly multi-threaded applications really are the way to go. Even a lot of current supposedly "multi-core utilizing" applications make use of just two cores.

--- Mr. DOS

Its more about making it easy to make multi-threaded programs, than convincing programmers. It isn't easy to write multi-threaded programs... (Which is why there's also so much research going on in that topic, but even that isn't going that fast...). Then again, the main use for such processors is servers, and especially virtualised server systems, which are inherently parallel. A desktop system rarely needs the sort of processing power even a single core can offer.

[Gouri]

Mainly it reduces the space and power requirements. single chip cloud computer named by intel.

[ah-blabla]

Mainly it reduces the space and power requirements. single chip cloud computer named by intel.

I doubt it will catch on though... Google use cheap commodity machines (read more in an article here) for a lot of their work (I've not seen cloud computing mentioned explicitly, but I doubt they would use much different a system there) because of their price to performance advantage, and the resulting redundancy because of their number, and the advantage of distribution (for a lot of work cpu isn't the main bottlehead -- with that many cores it's going to be the hard drive supplying data for processing) etc. It's likely to be rather uneconomical to have expensive powerful systems, which are also more of a problem if they fail. There's also a nice article about cloud hardware here, which is more general. Amazon mention their use of commodity hardware here -- and 48 core is hardly commodity. Bog standard web servers is where I see these chips ruling -- there is hardly a web host not offering virtualised servers nowadays. The more they can get in a machine the better. (And then you have the fast-computer freaks who just want to have the absolutely fastest hardware, even if it's of no practical use.)

[Gouri]

@ah-blabla : Good info thanks for sharing