The new processors, which Intel calls a "single-chip cloud computer" won't be for production. Instead, Intel said that it would share dozens of the experimental chips with academic researchers to help develop new parallel software programming models.
"We took somewhat of a different tack with the SCC [single-chip cloud computer], Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technical officer, told a press conference here on Wednesday. "We didn't want to duplicate the effort in our labs from the product organization," or the research effort used in Larrabee, the graphics-specific processor Intel has shown off at past conferences and has slated for production in 2010.
The new chips are part of Intel's "terascale" vision, which is driving toward a vision of the future where processors are made up of many, if not dozens, of individual cores. The problem is how to program them, so that their microarchitectural advantages can be taken advantage of. Rattner said that Intel had worked with and received input from a number of customers, without disclosing who they were. Intel also worked with the Univeristy of Illinois and the University of Illinois.
"Could you create a potentially a rich field of equipment with one or a very small number of these processors like the SCC, that is the fundamental question," Rattner said.
The key to the new 48-core chip, whose code name has not been disclosed, is that it is built on the Intel architecture, the standard X86 processor architecture that forms the foundation of its Core product line. Intel showed off an 80-core prototype chip, "Polaris," in 2006, but that processor emphasized floating-point operations and lacked a mesh architecture, according to Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.
Rattner not only showed off the wafer, but a PC running the unnamed chip as sort of co-processor.A live demonstration booted Rock Creek Linux across all 48 cores, allowing them to power a simple Java physics demonstration of 24 particles. The demonstration, while simple, proved that the technology was viable. "We've only worked with the technology for a few weeks," Adam Welc, a senior research scientist with Intel's microprocessor and programming research labs, said. "Imagine what we'll be able to do with it in a few months."
Microsoft also showed off recorded demonstrations of Visual Studio running on the chip, and other recorded demonstrations showed Hadoop's distributed Web search and power management applications that could tweak the individual voltage and frequency of each core.
Rattner identified the ease of programming the chip as an important step forward. Presentations made at the Hot Chips conference in August and other conferences have clarified that manufacturing a chip is the easy part. Programming it efficiently is not, as virtually all programming taught up until a few years ago focused on single-threaded architectures, where instructions were processed one after the other, serially.
"Our thought was to maintain compatibility and familiarity," Rattner said. "It was easier to do so from a programmable point of view."
Rattner also claimed that software designers would enjoy an advantage compared to GPU-based servers, which companies like Nvidia have claimed offer more of an optimized environment for certain workloads.
The new prototype chip actually contains 24 nodes, with two processors per node to reduce the number of cross connections, Peddie said, all arranged in a tile architecture. The 48 cores share four integrated DDR-3 memory controllers, with up to 64 Gbytes of addressable memory. Internally, the SCC chip is rated at 256 Gbytes/s of bisectional bandwidth and 64 Gbytes/s across each duplex link.
The single-chip cloud computer chip contains 1.3 billion transistors, designed by 40 people on three continents, Rattner said. It was fabricated on a 45-nm high-k process. Only one significant bug was discovered, an inverter that accidentally crept into the design.
All 48 cores should be able to operate at just 25 watts, or 125 watts at maximum power still a fraction of some GPUs manufactured today and a year or so ago.
Intle plans 6- and 8-core processors in 2010, and will integrate several of the key features showed off today in those chips, Intel said. Rattner would not comment on whether a 48-core chip was on the product roadmap.
Editor's Note: This story was updated at 12:56 PM PT with additional details.