Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Wednesday 9 July 2008, 1:58 PM
Bright new future of multicore, circa 1994
An article in German tech publication c't sheds a bit more light on Larrabee, Intel's much anticipated multicore chip. It's a graphics engine! It's an accelerator! It's going to wipe out nVidia with ray-tracing! It's... a bunch of 1994-vintage Pentiums?
Apparently so. As the article says, in Deutchglish via the fine offices of Google translation, "For the "Visual Computing" and in a later version for High Performance Computing is thought Larrabee, a processor, which has so far received 16 to 24 seeds traded, but probably the same with 32 cores next year debütieren is - and how now penetrated to general surprise, with exactly the most well-known Pentium cores: the Pentium P54C."
The P54C! That was the late 1994 first shrink of the original Pentium (to 600nm from 800nm), with 3 million transistors and 16k L1 cache. Doing the sums, a 32-core Larrabee based on a version "geshrinkt to 45nm" would still only have around 100 million transistors, or roughly what you'd expect from a high-end 2003 vintage processor.
It's not that simple. The c't article goes on to say that the cores will be 64 bit compatible and that the vector processing stuff will be 512 bits wide - and that the chip, while probably topping out at around 2 teraflops, will be guzzling some 300 watts.
Which isn't that bad for 32 Pentium cores. Let's hope they've fixed the FDIV bug.
Apparently so. As the article says, in Deutchglish via the fine offices of Google translation, "For the "Visual Computing" and in a later version for High Performance Computing is thought Larrabee, a processor, which has so far received 16 to 24 seeds traded, but probably the same with 32 cores next year debütieren is - and how now penetrated to general surprise, with exactly the most well-known Pentium cores: the Pentium P54C."
The P54C! That was the late 1994 first shrink of the original Pentium (to 600nm from 800nm), with 3 million transistors and 16k L1 cache. Doing the sums, a 32-core Larrabee based on a version "geshrinkt to 45nm" would still only have around 100 million transistors, or roughly what you'd expect from a high-end 2003 vintage processor.
It's not that simple. The c't article goes on to say that the cores will be 64 bit compatible and that the vector processing stuff will be 512 bits wide - and that the chip, while probably topping out at around 2 teraflops, will be guzzling some 300 watts.
Which isn't that bad for 32 Pentium cores. Let's hope they've fixed the FDIV bug.
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