Forget quad-core processors, try 64-core

One thing fans of cutting-edge technology can count on: Today’s breakthroughs are tomorrow’s commonplace items. High-tech advancements tend to trickle down to consumer electronics and personal computers in relatively short order.

 

After the recent announcement that Intel will provide what’s expected to be 64-core processors to drive the latest supercomputer at the University of Texas, however, one has to wonder whether future personal computing users will be able find ways to put all 64 of those cores to use. (That would require a lot of simultaneous games of “Angry Birds.”)

 

UT and the Texas Advanced Computing Center have announced plans to create a new supercomputer, called Stampede, that will be among the world’s most powerful machines. Construction of Stampede should be completed early in 2013, and the supercomputer will be able to handle 10 quadrillion operations per second. Powering Stampede will be Intel “many-core” processors. Intel did not specify the number of cores the processors will have, but recent Intel presentations indicate each processor will have 64 cores.

 

Stampede will consist of two primary components. Several thousand servers, each featuring 8-core Intel processors based on Sandy Bridge technology, will provide about 20 percent of the system’s peak performance. The other 80 percent will consist of a cluster of processors, called Knights Corner, that will feature as many as 64 cores each. Knights Corner processors will use a 22nm manufacturing process and Intel’s 3D Tri-Gate transistor technology.

 

Knights Corner is part of Intel’s Many Integrated Core, or MIC, line of x86 processors. MIC processors fit into the category of many-core processors, which is loosely defined as processors with tens of cores. Anything between 2 and 8 cores would be defined as multi-core.

 

Intel and AMD – the world’s other leading processor manufacturer – have quad-core processors available in current personal computers with 6- and 8-core processors on the PC drawing board. It’s been obvious for a few years that the future of CPUs involves adding more cores per processor. This migration has become necessary to provide more computing power, because, for the past few years, Intel and AMD have been unable to generate more clock speed than the 3GHz to 4GHz most of today’s processors offer. The amount of heat faster processors generate negates the benefit of more clock speed.

 

Hence, the manufacturers are turning to multiple cores to meet the need for speed.

 

However, can personal computer users find ways to make use of all of the processing power the MIC design will provide? Cynics would say that PCs already tend to have more processing power than most people will ever need. For average computer users, who tend to send and receive e-mail, visit a few websites and use a word processing package, the idea of quad-core processors is overkill. Even for those who tend to push their processors toward the limits, by working with video encoding or high-end gaming or by overclocking their computers, MICs might be more than they’d ever need.

 

Before writing off MICs and technologies like Knights Corner as gimmicks suited only for supercomputers, though, it’s worth noting that we’re just in the earliest stages of multi-core and many-core processors. It’s difficult to know exactly how computer designers and software designers will make use of many-core processors in terms of personal computing. Software designers must reconfigure their coding to take advantage of the parallelism that’s the key to using multi- and many-core processors. Some types of software, such as that used with video coding, do a better job than other types.

 

Even though such many-core chips may seem like overkill at this point, they might be the next must-have chip for personal computers in just a few years. Perhaps a completely new set of applications will grow out of seeing many-core processors migrate to the average PC. Certainly, if video technologies like 3D ever really become popular, and if everyday computing users want to render their own 3D video on a regular basis, many-core processors will become a necessity.

 

If not, there’s always the possibility of expanded gaming. Give me the chance to launch 64 of those powerful yellow birds simultaneously, and I’ll teach that mustached green pig a serious lesson.