Re: [squeak-dev] Prepare for Thousands of Cores --- oh my Chip - it's full of cores!

Philippe Marschall wrote:

2008/7/5, Peter William Lount peter@...:
  

Hi,

 Intel among others such as Tilera and NVidia are telling us - yes us
smalltalkers - to prepare for tens, hundreds and thousands of cores on a
single chip. It's up to us to bring this power to our end users - and
ourselves too!
    

The same Intel that has told us that the future will be IA64 / EPIC?
The same Intel that has promised us 20 Gigahurtz today? The same Intel
that tried to sell us RAMBUST? The same Intel that builds SSE into
it's processors to make the Internet faster?

Cheers
Philippe


  

Hi,

Yeah, the Itanium. An awesome chip architecture with an incredible instruction set. Gotta love it and it's doomed marketing.

Yes, that Intel who showed an 80 core research chip last year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teraflops_Research_Chip
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/06/21/intel-shows-off-2-tflops-processor
http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1449.htm

Yes, that Intel that is bringing out this little wonder.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080205-small-wonder-inside-intels-silverthorne-ultramobile-cpu.html

Intel isn't the only vendor up to the N-Core game. In fact they are getting beaten down hard by all the other contenders for the thrown. Hard.

Yes, Multi-core from the companies listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_(computing)

Yes, that Tilera. They have 20 and Tile-64 core chips now, with 128 cores in the works. They have indicated that they plan up to 4096 with their technology.
http://www.Tilera.com

Yes, that NVidia who is already delivering tons of boards with massive numbers of GPGPUs. I have a couple of these boards already.
http://www.NVidia.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_200_Series
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Tesla
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/03/nvidia-said-to-be-dropping-geforce-gtx-280-price-in-response-to/

Yes, AMD and Intel who announced 8 core mainstream chips for next year.

Yes, AMD (ATI) who announced this awesome speed beastie: 4870 X2 (RV770XT) cards. 800+ stream processing units!
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/03/amd-radeon-hd-4870-x2-images-leaked-rumored-for-august-release/
http://ati.amd.com/products/Radeonhd4800/specs.html

Yes, IBM who makes the 9 core cell processor chip.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)

Yes, Apple who just bought P.A. Semi.
http://gizmodo.com/382929/apple-buys-itself-a-little-chip-company-known-for-super-efficient-processors


These are not your or your fathers Transputer, most of these are real N-core processors available now.

Looking at the cpu power available to us and comparing it with the software that is available one can't but be either sad or highly motivated to make use of the powerful chips to make much better software. Heck we're still programming with words! What ever happened to visual programming? We still have macosx and windows and ick linux and unix as the best of the breed systems? Ick. Sure I use them all but come on... we can and must do better...

Cheers,

Peter