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Intel chief engineer (Justin rattner), showed at the conference Of international solid state circuits conference (ISSCC) the acting copy with 80- core processor. The declared performance of new processor impresses , it is 1-1,8 teraflop (but not 1 teraflop, as it was noted earlier, during the demonstration of prototype on IDF fall 06). Until today this is the most powerful floating point central processor . Approximately 200 such chips are sufficient in order to repeat the performance record of the most powerful super-computer (in 1996 it was made by 4,5 thousand Pentium pro processors to reach the performance of 1 teraflop).
In the course of presentation was shown the 3,16- GHz version 80- core processor, vcore of which was 0,95 v. in this case it consumed only 62 W .
1,8 teraflop can be reached, if we raise the frequency (and vcore) of processor to 5,7 GHz. In this case the energy consumption grow strongly up to 265 W.
Mr. rattner noted that first 80- core processor will be installed in servers (but not in PC, — x86 instruction are not supported, it use the architecture VLIW (Very long instruction word)), for company researchers they must solve numerous technical difficulties, such as: the methods of processor interaction with memory, the assignment of possibility to programmers to develop for this processor taking in account the special features of its architecture .
80 cores intel processor are lined in a tiled manner i.e. each core (computational element + router) is found in the immediate vicinity of core. This permits implementation of rapid data exchange in the process of processor work .
Over the area in 275 sq. mm Intel engineers placed 100 mln. transistors (for comparison, in Core 2 Duo there is 291 mln. transistors on 143 sq. mm) , produced on 65- NM technologies. For efficient production , probably, the thinner standards with lower technical process will be used, otherwise the production of chips with this design will be economically disadvantageous.
However, for Intel there are sufficiently much time in order to find the right interaction methods with memory of its 80- core processor , to transfer it to the thinner standards and to learn how to use entire power with the aid of appropriate software , as it was declared on IDF and confirmed on ISSCC, Intel plans to release this processor in the next five years. Related Products :
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