The cores, organised in a mesh architecture, are said to run at between 1.2-1.8GHz and, like the Inmos transputer, have multiple I/Os to connect to eachother and buffer memory for each core.
Each core can talk to every other core and the chip has 24 routers on-board to speed up core-to-core data exchange.
future is in few inches from us - very soon we will see this amazing 48-core chip, and in a very few monts out brand new mobile phone will be running 128-core central chip. wow!
what is the magic behind "48"? why they do not use binary stepping, like 1,2,4,8,16,... cores per chip?
Perhaps it's the maximum "nice looking" number they could get on the chip with the process they are using. 47 or 49 just doesn't look right, and powers of two would restrict them to a maximum of 32 if 64 is too many. My graphics card has an NVIDIA chip with 48 processors, but they make one with 256 processors, and are working on one with 512.
Last edited by leon_heller on Tue Apr 27, 2010 7:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
One answer is that it depends on the size that is used in production. Intel changed from 45 nm to 32 nm some time ago. That made it possible to fit 6 cores on the same area as using 4 cores in 45 nm technology in the Core i7 family. The core i7 can "eat" over 100 Amps in current as it already is, so it is not trivial to make a larger die.
32 nm is much smaller than visible light- so we can not expect it to be easy to reduce the size - the size reduction only takes small steps in the near future, and quantum tunneling will become a large problem with our existing silicon technology.
Probably not the most confused programmer anymore on the XCORE forum.
Nupga is packing 3d, Tabula is packing 3d and someelse is packing a 4d spacetime thing.
I don't think this Intel chip is mobile to me its just another Intel knock-off like the I-tanic.
We'll just have to wait an see how ChipZilla plays its deal.