"In an announcement at the International Supercomputing Conference, Intel provided further details on the many-core chip that it hinted at earlier in the month. The first product based on the new design will be codenamed Knight's Corner, and will debut at 22nm with around 50 x86 cores on the same die. Developer kits, which include a prototype of the design called Knight's Ferry, have been shipping to select partners for a while now, and will ship more broadly in the second half of the year. When Intel moves to 22nm in 2011, Knight's Corner will make its official debut."
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Member since:2009-04-23
Well ... intel has eDRAM which is more compact which is also why intel chips have such huge caches these days...
I would be curious to see what would happen if cores were capped at 4 and whatever extra die space were thrown at cache and a real integrated GPU design where it would be more akin to how an FPU is treated instead of just a device hanging off of PCI-E
Member since:2006-01-02
Aren't you confusing them with IBM? I'm pretty sure Intel is just really good at making small cheap SRAM.
On top of that, even eDRAM would leave them with the problem of having to have a royal caravan of RAM slots--it would only make the size of cache cheaper. eDRAM is still no performance match for SRAM.
However, even with SRAM caches, workloads that can crunch on moderate sizes of data that can be fit into a shared cache might be able to work very fast, without jacking up the RAM bandwidth. If Intel needed to, I'm sure they could do 32+MB SRAM caches on a die, and still make their high margins.
Edited 2010-06-02 04:09 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2006-10-01
Doubtful it will be useful in super computing. The current 6 core chips tended to not have nearly the performance improvement over 4 core chips that was expected. Mostly because the problem isn't CPUs count. Or CPU speed. The problem is the memory. Memory bandwidth is the killer, and no one seems to be offering solutions.