Intel Shows Off at Developer Forum - Other Developments
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So very soon, we'll be up to four cores. What about five years from now? Well, we know Intel is committed to Moore's Law. Sure enough, the company showed off a research prototype chip that boasts 80 cores on a single die. This experimental chip is just 300 millimeters square, yet it is capable of exchanging a terabyte or more of data every second. Each core runs at 3.16 GHz.
Intel is also working on replacing wires with optical technology in computers and chips. This initiative dates back to 2001, and has resulted in a silicon laser. The laser could be used to help the cores communicate with each other.
Intel believes these chips will be used in what it calls the "mega data center," where tera-scale chips will run hosted applications. "This kind of performance for the first time gives us the capability to imagine things like real-time video search or real-time speech translation from one language to another," said Otellini. Who needs that kind of power? Companies like Google and its new subsidiary YouTube, for openers. Any firm that handles that level of data and needs to deal with it in real time will be interested.
Indeed, the chipmaker foresees tera-scale servers accounting for one in four of all server sales by the end of this decade. "We are talking about a fundamental change in the way that the whole computing infrastructure is built," Intel CTO Justin Rattner emphasized.
I have to wonder if the company is being a little optimistic. This is a mammoth undertaking, after all, and a lot can happen (both good and bad) in five years. Some company representatives also sounded pretty optimistic about how quickly gaming companies would start producing multi-threaded games for the quad core architecture. "If they don't do it, their competitors will," said Zohar, predicting that by next Christmas, "the market will be flooded with multi-threaded games." At least he wasn't predicting that for this Christmas. On the other hand, with AMD likely to have its own quad core processors out by then, gaming companies will have even more incentive.
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