Intel showcases 80-core CPU

[Zachstar]

Originally Posted by Respenus

This is very, very interesting. It just happens I read an article about personal "supercomputers" that run on Intel Xeon processors and uses Linux to enable clustering. Now the whole rig can cost from 25-60k $. Now imagine this with the new Intel chips. She prices would drop drastically.

Since I don't expect this lovely bit of technology to come knocking on our doorsteps for quite I while, I'd rather see CELL technology incorporated into PC chips. If it works so well for PS3, why can't it work in PCs?

Bah, I remember my first PC I bought in 1997 (we had a family PC long before that). It was a 166 Pentium II MMX, a couple of MBs on the GPU, couldn't have been more that 16 or 32 MB of RAM. Ah, those were the days. The games looked like crap compared to today's HD graphics, but still. They were very much playable. Ah, the good old days.

CELL technology is already for PC!

http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/03/l...ng-pci-e-card/

Also I think 3 PS3s linked equals a small super computer but the things you do with a cell are different than an X86. Cells are great for crunching protein folding data while X86s kick ass with crunching business data.

Even a 20 buck ATI Theater 550 has an MPEG-2 chip on it. You are starting to see much more emphasis on chips doing their own work and less on the CPU.

[Zachstar]

I would like to mention another benefit with massive amounts of cores.

The fold@home project got a HUGE HUGE HUGE boost with the PS3 Client and the Video Card client.

With supercomputers at the hands of many thousands... It will become much easier to do massive amounts of CPU intensive research never before possible without NASA or IBM supercomputers.

One of the main ones is of course health. Where projects like Fold@home give massive amounts of refined data that mostly likely will end up with us finding preventive and treatment measures for a number of diseases in the future.

[Respenus]

WARNING, RANT BELOW!!!

What about game data then? I know that PS3 games have been coded to the hardware to make the most of it, but how can then a PS3 run a 720i or 1080i HD game on a 40in screen (I guess only the support the screen offers matters, not the size) and my computer with "more" GPU can't. I know that GPU's now come in 2Gbs ranges. My God, what have we done? Where's the 6Mb era of isometric 3D? I can buy a new rig, if I had the money and the interest to do it, both of which I don't have (the money part of unfortunate).

PS3 is older than my computer, no upgrades were done to the hardware expect the HD and still stuff looks better? For what? The fraction of what a new PC rig would cost?

Sometimes I wish computers had not happened as they are nothing but trouble. On the other hand, they have become very useful tools and I guess the new Intel chip will give even more functionality to every household.

[Zachstar]

PS3 hardware is completely different from PC hardware.

It is there for games and thus is designed for games. And on top of that the games are compiled JUST for that platform and not with the extra stuff needed to run on a multitude of PC and card types.

That is why the Xbox360 can run FC2 and that is why FC2 is the top of the line for it. PC GPUs are starting to leave it in the dust.

[CaptainHaplo]

One question - think of the heat that bugger is going to create in a standard desktop sized application. Better budget now for liquid-cooling.