Intel to Ship Experimental Chips With 48 Cores
Don't ask.
While we may be mightily impressed at the multiplying of cores in the hexacore Gulftown Core i7-980X, the octacore Nehalem-EX Xeon 7500 and the dodecacore AMD Magny-Cours Opteron 6000 series, Intel has something special up its sleeve that it is releasing in limited quantities – and it has 48 cores.
Intel's been testing an experimental 48-core CPU for some time, and it is now preparing to ship some of those to researchers by the end of the second quarter, according to IDG News Service. The chip will primarily be sent to academic institutions, but certain special features the chip could eventually find their way into commercial offerings.
For example, the 48-core chip features 24 small routers between the cores, which facilitate faster data exchanges across the chip. Each core also has on-chip buffers that can instantly exchange data in parallel across all the cores.
Intel also says that the 48-core chip has a more advanced on-die power management system that can vary the power draw between 25 watts to 125 watts. It can also reduce clock speed and shut down cores.
As far as clock speeds go, current desktop and even laptop offerings outpace this 48-core wonder. Intel revealed that its experimental chip runs at about the same frequencies as the Atom CPU, so we're looking in the neighbourhood of 1.2GHz to 1.83GHz.
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now we just need software to run on it..
wonder how long it takes to get these chips to the desktop..
Wonder how it squares up in compute with a Tilera
how useful...
Y'know, I'd love to run a multi-core aware encoder or renderer on this - 6 Nehalem cores at 3.33GHz vs 48 at 1.8GHz
I'd go for volume over speed in this regard any day.
how useful...
Ironically your sarcasm is wasted, since it IS useful.
Well for me this confirms there is really no point in "biting the bullet" and buying a CPU, i have had a q6600 for two years and was thinking of an upgrade,
With the pace going so fast in chip dev. (albeit nothing major new but die size shrinkage and shared cache etc) it seemspretty pointless even thinking about a purchase at this stage.
It's nice to see everything develop so fast though ...pretty amazing looking how far its all come scince my first CPU (486 dx2 66mhz (with turbo on ^^)
Thats sick!!
Azul Systems has had 54-core CPUs for a while: http://www.azulsystems.com/technology/vega We have some of their systems at work, which are great.
But can it run Metro 2033
48 cores and still poor with many modern games. Headfuck or what?
i have had a q6600 for two years and was thinking of an upgrade
I'll take that off your hands for a reasonable sum
But can it run Metro 2033
And I was wondering how long it would be before this line made an appearance....