The chip industry has a problem — can looking to the architecture of the web help? The tradeoff between faster performance and power consumption has led the chip industry to add more and more cores to each chip to keep delivering more speed and features to users.
Getting to next generation systems in high performance computing has inspired technologies that we now use everyday in data centers, but as the drive for exascale computing continues, it seems ingenuity is coming to an end. But is power consumption the real hurdle for bigger systems?
We are moving from the information age to the insight age. So the computer industry is building chip with more cores to keep up with influx of data and the need to process it faster. But more cores means new ways of programming.
Facebook engineers have tested a 64-core chip from Tilera and found it ideal for grabbing data quickly from key value stores. This may galvanize the creation of new benchmarks as the debate of which architecture works best for webscale and cloud computing rages.
Mobile hardware is progressing at a blistering pace, but to deliver the type of user experiences enabled by awesome hardware software must keep pace. This goes beyond the need for innovations in OSes and applications, to the underlying software that ties everything together.
The brains inside your smartphone are getting more power with the latest version of application processors having two processing cores to help speed up the delivery of web site load times and mobile gameplay. That’s awesome, but startup Adapteva, wants to take that number higher.
People are complicated organisms that have evolved systems of feedback and governance to ensure our minds and out bodies perform well. As computers gain more cores, MIT scientists are building an operating system to create a similar system of feedback to ensure the machine performs well.
Intel’s Paul Otellini said on Tuesday night that the chip firm would release a dual-core Atom chip during the second quarter. Intel won’t be alone in adding more cores for mobile devices, smartphones could get multiple cores by the end of this year or in 2011.
Although software is the most important ingredient of the next-generation Internet – from web applications to cloud-computing platforms – hardware vendors are not shy about marketing their wares as integral parts of the equation. Lately, Cisco claimed it will revolutionize the Internet with its CRS-3 router, and startups like Tilera are shilling new RISC-based many-core chips. If we accept the premise that hardware upgrades are necessary, the question remains as to who will sell us this new gear.
