Intel Announce 48 Core Processor!

[Monsta®]

impressive read this

i want one for xmas!

[threegee]

The forum moderator might care to correct the link (missing colon).

Unfortunately you wouldn't be able to get one for Xmas because this isn't a real product.

The new processor is not a product, does not have a name and will be a limited edition of 100 or more made available next year to researchers developing new software applications and programming models.

[source: The FT]

And, even if you did, you wouldn't be able to do much with it as there is no commercial software support.

Sticking n cores on a chip doesn't give you an n times improvement in a single application. There are huge problems "parallelising" normal computing tasks, and the results are often very disappointing. This multi-core is likely to be used in researching those problems.

[Monsta®]

still its a huge leap in chip design, if it won't be long until there released to the public! what are we up to now 4 core or something! just like everything else i remeber when the bigest hdd you could get was 2gb and simms were still in use! i thought my 133mhz intel chip was fast!

[threegee]

There have been 96 core CPUs around for years that are designed to be run in pairs, and with other boards of same. Granted they are specalist ones that aren't x86 compatible, but they have addressed some of the parallel processing problems. The support software is very important, and here Intel are just playing catch-up.

Now there are 192 core versions of the same. I've got a little bit of my hard-earned in this company, but I wouldn't recommend it as a "safe" investment.

Where Intel score is the processing technology (that produced the 45nm Atom, and the forthcoming 32nm Moorestown chipset). They are gearing up for 22nm now. Other manufacturers are struggling to keep up (or maybe that should be keep down? ).