Intel unveils Knights Corner 50 core server chip
1–10 of 27 posts
Re: Intel unveils Knights Corner 50 core server chip
#250 cores! I thought Sun's Niagara chip was crazy... With Intel pushing even more cores now Concurrent programming paradigms are going to continue to grow in importance.
Re: Intel unveils Knights Corner 50 core server chip
#3I would love to see this on a desktop. Why? Because that would generate a powerful incentive to parallelize desktop software. Number of cores will do nothing but increase for the foreseeable future and per-thread performance will not go up much.
Even if they release an 8-core part at desktop processor prices, that would be great.
OTOH, if parallelizing of desktop software improves much, there will less reason to go x86 when compared to multi-core ARM-based designs.
Re: Intel unveils Knights Corner 50 core server chip
#450 cores! I thought Sun's Niagara chip was crazy... With Intel pushing even more cores now Concurrent programming paradigms are going to continue to grow in importance.
Sadly, I doubt Sunoracle will be able to top that with a 16-core Niagara III running 16 threads per core. In the meantime, Niagara II is shipping and this Intel piece is vaporware.
I would also like to remind the more overly enthusiastic (me included) that this family seems heavily targeted towards scientific (read FP-heavy) computing and I would expect more x86-controlled/GPU-based solutions in that space in the future. Niagara is more of a general-purpose animal targeted towards web and database workloads.
Re: Intel unveils Knights Corner 50 core server chip
#5 Each core in Knights Corner runs at 1.2GHz, is supported by
512-bit vector processing units, has 8MB of cache, and four
threads per core.
Re: Intel unveils Knights Corner 50 core server chip
#6I would love to see this on a desktop. Why? Because that would generate a powerful incentive to parallelize desktop software. Number of cores will do nothing but increase for the foreseeable future and per-thread performance will not go up much. Even if they release an 8-core part at desktop processor prices, that would be great. OTOH, if parallelizing of desktop software improves much, there will less reason to go x…
A lot of desktop applications aren't well suited for multi-core use. They have been written for a long time as single-threaded applications and making them multi-threaded is a huge task for a small gain. Some applications get worse when first made to use multiple cores and it takes a lot of tweaking and rewriting to get performance back to where it was.
2-8 cores on the desktop hasn't made a huge dent. 50-cores is a bit extreme. It's going to thrive in the server market where one system is typically servicing many requests from many users. Desktops are generally designed to only service one user.
Re: Intel unveils Knights Corner 50 core server chip
#7I wonder how many servers are currently CPU-bound? I've always been I/O bound (interchange that with memory-bound, depending on how much you would like to spend on memory).
Re: Intel unveils Knights Corner 50 core server chip
#8I guess, in a few years I'll be working in HPC after all! At my home!
Re: Intel unveils Knights Corner 50 core server chip
#9I wonder how many servers are currently CPU-bound? I've always been I/O bound (interchange that with memory-bound, depending on how much you would like to spend on memory).
Considering there is 8 meg of cache for all the cores, this must be for CPU-bound tasks only
Re: Intel unveils Knights Corner 50 core server chip
#10I wonder how many servers are currently CPU-bound? I've always been I/O bound (interchange that with memory-bound, depending on how much you would like to spend on memory).
Many HPC servers are CPU-bound.