Tech-Ed 16 Core Intel Preview

[imported_chewie]

Sat through an intel manycore session today that covered some of the places MS is improving their libraries and products to enable the return of the "free lunch". Free lunch meaning the increase of relative system speed getting back in line the die shrinks. I was happy with what they showed as far as ease of implementation and thought that went into the design of their tools. One nice suprise was the demoing of an "unreleased processor" system. No idea exatly how many cores per die, but he let us believe that it was a 16 core processor, my guess is two 8's at most and probably four quad's; either way it was nice. One thing MS has achieved in select situations was a super linear increase as a result of being able to cancel execution on processors. Meaning that if it is a shortest path problem, or something where all the cores are searching for a solution, when a solution is found all cores stop processing without finishing what they were doing. The sixteen cores acheived a 15x speed increase. In a sudoku solver solving 15 puzzles four cores achieved a 9-10 times speed increase.

 

[ther00kie16]

Sounds interesting, but probably two quad core nehalem with 8 threads each. Here's a screenshot.