48 Core Vega 2 in the Making

TobyKY76 writes to tell us The Inquirer is reporting that upstart Azul Systems is planning to integrate 48 cores on their next generation chip. From the article: "The first-generation Vega processor it designed has 24 cores but the firm expects to double that level of integration in systems generally available next year with the Vega 2, built on TSMC's 90nm process and squeezing in 812 million transistors. The progress means that Azul's Compute Appliances will offer up to 768-way symmetric multiprocessing."

Not for nothing...

[Red Flayer]

But I'd tend to take a website's articles with a grain of salt when the links at the bottom of the page are:

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Sounds to me like someone issued a press release and wants a share of the excess VC floating around... and the Inquirer took the bait. They did a good job of not loading the buzzwords, though -- they didn't say they would 'leverage their experience with graphics chip design' or anything like that.

I'd expect this company to turn around and sell out to AMD or Intel at the earliest opportunity, if given the chance.

768 cores, why?

[Coopjust]

Dual cores, quad cores, whatever, I can understand that for multitasking and programming. But 768 cores? What would possibly use that many cores? And for any single task, the thing would not be efficient. What exactly is the point of this? Bragging rights?

So what's the memory model?

[Tired and Emotional]

So what does the memory interconnect look like on this thing? They say its not NUMA but I see no mention of what it is.

There's no way you can feed that many processors over a single bus and if you've got symmetric access to a bunch of busses, that's one heck of a cross bar switch and I don't see that its any easier to program than NUMA. Instead of making sure data you need fast is local you have to make sure you load balance - that has to be harder much of the time.

Re:768 cores, why?

[thrillseeker]

What would possibly use that many cores?

Any task that can be split into multiple processes. An example is an array of data, where a single algorithm is going to be applied to each element. An array of data can represent anything - an image, or stock prices, or DNA, etc.

for any single task, the thing would not be efficient.

It depends on what you really mean by a single task - a given process consists of multiple sequential tasks, where a task may be as fine-grained as a single CPU operation, or perhaps due to overhead of communication between tasks, a tuning effort can be made to say a "task" is some multiple of operations.

traditional programming languages obsolete?

[Khashishi]

Languages like c are inherently serial. All statements must be placed in sequential order even when there are no serial dependencies between the two. E.g.
x = zeta(y)
w = gamma(z)
print(x+w)
The code explicitly states that x should be calculated before w although they could certainly be calculated concurrently. Of course a smart compiler could figure out the dependencies, but the programming language shouldn't force the programmer to specify an order when none exist.

I predict that non-procedural languages will dominate the future of programming. Some currently used languages seem already well-suited for taking advantage of multiple cores, like HDL languages, functional languages, Labview-style languages.