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Intel reveals design for fast, efficient future chips
2008-08-04
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Intel has revealed details of a new generation of chips designed for video game lovers, multi-taskers, and people seeking power-sipping computers adapted to increasingly mobile lifestyles. The world's largest chip maker provided a glimpse of "multi-core" computer processing technology code-named "Larrabee" that it plans to showcase next week at an industry conference in Los Angeles. Intel and rival Advanced Micro Devices already sell chips with two or four "cores," basically the brains in processors. Intel is to release in 2009 or 2010 a first wave of Larrabee chips with 16 to 48 cores and tailored for handling computer game graphics. Multi-core chips cut energy use and heat while speeding performance by dividing tasks between cores. Portions of programs run simultaneously in a style referred to as "parallel computing." Traditional single-core processors handle tasks in a linear fashion, racing from start to finish in sequence. Along with allowing faster computer game play with film quality graphics, multi-core chips are considered a boon to computer users increasingly prone to tending to multiple tasks at once. For example, a computer user might watch online video, tend to email and text messaging while anti-virus software runs in the background. Designing software and support architecture that best enables "many-core" chips to divide tasks among the brains in ways that maximize computing efficiency has proved daunting. Software creators weren't motivated to exert the "lunar landing size effort" to shift to writing for many-core chips because there wasn't any hardware in the market to run it on, according to Intel spokesman Nick Knupffer. "There was a chicken and egg situation," Knupffer told AFP. "The hardware guys couldn't make a chip until there was software out there. We had a stalemate." The first Larrabee product will be a graphics card because high-quality games are beginning to capitalize on "parallelizing" software. "Think of it as a key to unlock the next era of computing; the many-core era," Knupffer said. "It's a bit like a supercomputer on a chip. Really, the sky is the limit in terms of what software makers can do with it." As developers grow comfortable crafting programs for many-core chips, Larrabee processor technology built on today's common computer designs will be spread to other hardware roles and devices, according to Intel. Microsoft and Intel have software research alliances with major universities and Intel is also working with the US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "It is important for industry to work in tandem with academia to unleash the immense power of parallel computing," Microsoft Research vice president Tony Hey said when the alliance was announced. Intel researchers have already made an 80-core processor. "We're quickly moving the computing industry to a many-core world," Intel Research director Andrew Chien said at the alliance launch. Chien predicts that multi-core chips will let computers "bridge the physical world with the virtual." Predicted research breakthroughs include software enabling people's mobile telephone to recognize faces of approaching acquaintances and whisper their names to users. Another foreseeable application is described as voice recognition software so accurate it could be used to record witness testimony in courtroom proceedings. Intel expects Larrabee "to to kick start an industry-wide effort to create and optimize software for the dozens, hundreds and thousands of cores expected to power future computers." Larrabee's initial foray into the multi-billion dollar computer graphics market will put it in an arena dominated by Nvidia and AMD, which both reportedly plan to market graphics cards with hundreds of cores.
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