Comment Cores per memory controller. (Score 1) 251
I'd love to see each core on a massively multicore design get its own memory controller. I'm not holding my breath, however. If you think of a 32-core CPU, it's pretty unlikely that most supercomputer or cluster vendors are going to pay for 32 dimms for each cpu socket. So then you're talking about multiple memory channels per memory stick. You can still get ECC using 5 memory chips per channel, so you can imagine 4 channels fitting on a memory riser. Cray does this on the X2. Then 32 channels would only require 8 dimms, which is reasonable. Then what do you do for 64-core CPUs?
It's tricky, and the problem for the market is that it's expensive. Can you get the commodity CPU vendors interested in such a thing, given that most of their addressable market is not in the supercomputing space?
I think We're gonna see more cores in a CPU that there's bandwidth to use. They might increase the bandwidth a bit, but probably just enough to get good linpack numbers.