Intel shows linear scaling with MIC coprocessor

The chip world is moving from multicore to many-core, says Intel chief technology office Justin Rattner. In certain circles, such talk makes sense – a many-core chip includes many more cores than a multicore chip – and according to Rattner, the transition to a many-core world won't be as difficult as expected. At the Intel …

[Goat Jam]

Marketing

Marketing Droid 1: Hey, this multicore stuff is da bomb, we need to push it harder

Marketing Droid 2: Yeah, but all our competitors are doing it too

Marketing Droid 1: Then let's put more of those "core" doo-hickeys in our stuff

Marketing Droid 2: OK, but our competitors are likely to be planning that too

Marketing Droid 1: Hmmm, then what we need to do is give ours a another name.

Marketing Droid 2: Like?

Marketing Droid 1: Oh, I dunno, what about "many-core". "many" is more than "multi", right?

Marketing Droid 2: Uh, maybe, I suppose . . .

Marketing Droid 1: Great, many-core it is, get one of our eggheads out to one of our geek-fests to tell everyone about our great new product.

Marketing Droid 2: OK, hey, is that that beret wearing weirdo down the hall? I think he has something to do with making the shit we sell.

[Pperson]

Same old same old

"Basically, CERN is seeing essentially linear scalability on the Knights coprocessor."

What a shock - take a pre-existing embarrassingly-parallel distributed algorithm, run it on many-core CPUs (thereby removing the network) and .. it remains embarrassingly-parallel! Boy, that's magical.

"...it is an easy transition from multicore to many core" As opposed to what? Programming the GPU? Rattner himself says that many-core is just scaled-up multi-core (ie: a name change) so this statement is meaningless. In fact, the whole presentation was meaningless since it's just more-of-the-same as it has been since Core-2 (or even the HT Pentium-IV), just 10 years and more cores on.

"Now, we are just at the beginning of the age of many-core processors."

I'm inspired.

[Francis Boyle]

And

it:'s not like we didn't already know physics simulations.work well on massively parallel co-processors.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's happened to the art of bylining?

A simple "March of the Pentiums" would've been much better.

[Eddy Ito]

"but it's going to be 64 cores..."

Awww, come on Intel! It's a coprocessor so the number of cores should be... 87. Dont' forget to build it so a system can have multiple coprocessors. I can't wait for the day when I can show off my new computer that has 4 87 coprocessors.

It's the one with the 5 1/4 floppy in the pocket. Thanks

Oh sorry, that's a type of floppy disk.

A flat square thing with what looks like a thin flexible record inside.

A record is piece of vinyl with a groove.... never mind, I'll get a new one.

[Jonathan Walsh]

Nice hat

Nice hat.

[Stutter]

OpenCL isn't AMD's stream processing language, it's called FireStream. OpenCL is an open standard that has no connection to either; an NVIDIA suit is on the board, even though it has CUDA.