48-Core Chips Could Redefine Mobile Devices 285
CWmike writes "Intel researchers are working on a 48-core processor for smartphones and tablets, but it could be five to 10 years before it hits the market. Having a 48-core chip in a small mobile device would open up a whole new world of possibilities. 'If we're going to have this technology in five to 10 years, we could finally do things that take way too much processing power today,' said analyst Patrick Moorhead. 'This could really open up our concept of what is a computer... The phone would be smart enough to not just be a computer but it could be my computer.' Enric Herrero, a research scientist at Intel Labs in Barcelona, explained that with the prototype chip someone could, for instance, be encrypting an email while also working on other power-intensive apps at the same time — without hiccups. Same for HD video. Intel's Tanausu Ramirez said it could also boost battery life. 'The chip also can take the energy and split it up and distribute it between different applications,' he said. Justin Rattner, Intel's CTO, told Computerworld that a 48-core chip for small mobile devices could hit the market 'much sooner' than the researchers' 10-year prediction."
10 years? (Score:3, Informative)
Hah! The Parallela Kickstarter project was from a group that already had a 64 core CPU that consumed only a watt or 4 of power when running full-tilt. If this takes Intel 10 years to design they'll be left in the dust.
BTW, they wanted the money to fund developing the mask for the Fab technique needed to mass produce them for $100 apiece instead of the few hundred apiece they now cost to manufacture. The chips already exist.
48 Cores? (Score:5, Informative)
Not useful without a serious change in computer architecture.
Amdahl's law [wikipedia.org]. It's a bitch, baby.
Been there, done that? (Score:5, Informative)
Haven't we already been here? When multi-core processors first became widely available, I recall a study that showed that anything over 8 cores was counterproductive. First, very few people have enough background stuff running to need more processing power than that. Second, coordinating multi-tasking on multiple cores requires a lot of complex work by the operating system, unless you just dedicate one to each process (not to each thread - that opens up problems with cache and data consistency). The benchmarks on desktop computers showed that adding more than 8 cores to a general purpose system actually slowed the system down due to added OS overhead.
About the only way this many cores can be useful is for graphics processing (or, in TFA, video processing): many simple cores work in parallel for the same process, on different parts of the same data. This, of course, is what graphics chips already do for a living.
Re:Desktop (Score:5, Informative)
Any desktop with a decent GPU has more than that already.
But the difference between a desktop and a phone makes it harder to get good performance on the desktop with many cores - it's memory bandwidth that's the bottleneck. On a phone you can dedicate cores to certain well-defined tasks and optimize them for that.
Re:10 years? (Score:4, Informative)
Context:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone
Re:48 Cores? (Score:5, Informative)