Jamming Cores on a Chip… The Real Questions
Listening to: Mumbai Theme Tune - Talvin Singh
Ars Technica have a wonderfully mind-opening article about the real questions that Intel have started asking now that they have jammed 80 cores onto one chip:
The picture that Sawicki painted is of a server-room-on-a-chip—a single piece of silicon that uses many cores and virtualization to do the kind of work that it currently takes multiple networked servers to do. Sawicki gave the example of a hypothetical multicore chip that can run a high-volume e-commerce solution on a single piece of silicon. Instead of web server box that takes orders and then sends them over the network to another machine for processing, you could use two separate cores for these tasks, with each core running a virtual server.
Problems might arise, however, when an order comes in through the virtual web server, and then order data has to be moved to another virtual server for processing. Ideally, you want the transaction data to move from virtual server to virtual server—and from core to core—without leaving the chip, Sawicki explained. It would be a waste to send those packets off the chip to a router to reach a destination that’s a few cores away.
A set of seriously cool questions to ask and answer!
