Cloud 48
Intel's rallying cry for the past few years has been "more cores!" (or should that be Moore Cores?) and the latest product to emerge from the firm's labs is no exception.
The firm just announced that its boffins have managed to demonstrate an experimental, 48-core processor, or "single-chip cloud computer," which boasts about 10 to 20 times the processing engines of a regular system while consuming only as much electricity as two standard light bulbs.
The prototype has been dubbed the "single-chip cloud computer" because it purportedly resembles the organisation of datacentres used to create a cloud of computing resources over the Internet.
Cloud datacenters connect tens to thousands of computers physically over a cabled network, in order to distribute large tasks and massive datasets in parallel. Intel reckons its chip uses a similar approach, with the difference being that all the computers and networks are actually integrated onto just one piece of 45nm, high-k metal-gate silicon - about the size of a postage stamp.
48 cores will be the most programmable Intel processing cores ever bunged onto a single silicon chip, so Intel has had to come up with a high-speed on-chip network to facilitate the sharing of information, as well as new power management techniques. These purportedly allow all 48 cores to operate at as little as 25 watts when idle, or at 125 watts when running at maximum performance.
