Intel 80-core teraflop processor won’t be a flop

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 13 February 2007 10:23

Opinion and Analysis

Remember the old megahertz and gigahertz wars? Now the future is multi-core processors, and Intel’s new 80-core prototype processor is a peek into the future of tomorrow – today.

A few years ago at an Intel briefing I attended around 2001, the talk of the time was the goodness of gigahertz. By 2007, we were told, 20Ghz processors would be the norm, enabling effortless voice recognition and a host of other astounding technology feats.

Fast forward 6 years, and 20Ghz processors are nowhere to be seen, obliterated by the complications of getting technology that small to run so fast. Heat and electricity leakage were limitations that ultimately couldn’t be overcome due to a better development, that of the multicore processor.

The processor with more than one core, or in layman’s terms, more than one ‘brain’, is now a standard part of the computing landscape. Only a couple of years ago single core chips still ruled the microprocessor roost, now they are on the lowest rung of mainstream computing power.

Intel’s quad-core processor, lambasted by perennial competitor AMD as being two dual-core chips stuck together, is now a mainstream product too, with AMD’s ‘true’ quad-core processor on the horizon and Intel’s own true quad-core not far behind either.

Intel has even launched the ‘eight-core’ processor by sticking two quad-core processors together, giving those who need oodles of desktop computing power the opportunity to purchase it today.

But if you thought that a processor with 8 cores was a lot, Intel’s new 80-core prototype processor, capable of a trillion operations per second, or a teraflop, has recently been unveiled onto the world stage.

It’s able to perform these trillion operations per second consuming only 62 watts of power, at a clock frequency of 3.12Ghz on a chip the size of your fingernail. It's still way behind the 20Ghz that was foretold for today, but theoretically offering much more computing power than a single-core 20Ghz processor would ever have delivered.

One thing’s for sure, too – we didn’t need 20Ghz for voice recognition. The software behind the technology is so good that it’s built into Windows Vista as standard. Of course, it’s still only voice recognition, and not the computer understanding us when we say ‘find me the cheapest pair of Levi 501’s in a 10 mile radius from my house’. But with future processors this kind of ‘voice recognition’ is sure to come.

The important thing for consumers to take away from the release of an 80-core prototype is not that their shiny new ‘Intel Core 2 Duo’ or ‘AMD Athlon X2’ dual core processors are now suddenly woefully out of date.

After all, Intel themselves say that an 80-core processor is still anywhere from 3 to 8 years in the future. Your new dual-core computer is good for at least a couple of years yet.

What’s important to understand is that the march of technology is by no means standing still, and Moore’s Law of computing power doubling every 18 months or so shows no signs of being broken anytime soon. The science fiction future of graphics that look as real as ‘real life’, computers that understand us when we speak to them thanks to advanced artificial intelligence, the rise of humanoid robots that are computers that can walk, talk and interact with us the way we see in science fiction and plenty more is all on the way, and probably sooner than we think – unless we are collectively stupid enough to environmentally destroy ourselves first.

After all, the statement that we’re likely to see more technological advancement over the next 20-30 years than we’ve seen in the last 2000 is oft-quoted (by me) because it is very likely indeed to be absolutely correct, and will make the 20th century look like we took our sweet time in developing amazing new technologies. Buckle up, peoples – we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. In eight years time we likely won’t have a processor with 80 cores, we’ll probably have one with 8000!