[Beowulf] 64-core processor...

[Larry Stewart]

Geoff wrote:
>
> Ars Technica also has an article on this:
>
> http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/mit-startup-raises-multicore-bar-with-new-64-core-cpu.ars 
>
>
> Good for additional information.
>
> -geoff
>
 From the picture in Ars Technica, there are four memory controllers for 
64 processors. 
There is no floating point, but there would certainly be room for it in 
a 65 nm version.
It seems to me that the key difficulty for building larger clusters out 
of these things
is the imbalance between computing and memory bandwidth.  That is fine 
for rendering
and routing, but not so fine for general purpose computing.  16 cores 
per DDR interface
(doesn't say if they are 64 or 128 bits wide, but I would guess 64 based 
on reasonable size
package pin counts) seems way too skinny a pipe to memory to be reasonable.

-Larry