48 cores from Intel will soon become available.

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Intel has until the end of II quarter of this year, will begin shipping the experimental processor with 48 cores. However, while we are talking about a limited number of chips that are on the Rights of the pilot will be directed to various academic institutions. But the issue of commercial versions of 48-core processor is not expected - CPU Technology, in this case too strongly ahead of related technologies for commercial release to "tighten" the level of other PC components.

All this at a recent New York event, said lead engineer Intel Shawn Coelho. And Intel Labs engineer Christopher Anderson elaborated: new chips operate at a frequency of modern processors Atom (about 1,6-1,8 GHz). In this case all 48 cores total spend no more than 25 watts in standby mode and 125 watts at peak performance. Moreover, each core can operate at its voltage and its frequency, or be completely turned off the no-load. During the public demonstration of Intel engineers loaded the system with 48-core processor financial application - with the chip power consumption less than one second decreased from 74 to 25 watts. This is due to an automatic stop a certain number of nuclei.

The processor is made on the basis of a full mesh (mesh) architecture - that is, any kernel has a switching channel to each of the neighboring nuclei. This can greatly increase the speed of data transmission in comparison with the architecture of x86. In addition, this architecture allows to multiply the number of nuclei.

Remember that 48-core processor was designed by engineers in the Intel research project on the massive parallel computing, called Intel Terascale Computing. The chip was originally not supposed to put on the market, its purpose - testing technologies that will continue to be implemented already in commercial chips. First of all be working out mechanisms for managing the work of a large number of nuclei and the ways of coordination.

Actually, the prototype 48-core processor has been demonstrated in late 2009. The developers then called him "single-chip computer to cloud computing," and argued that the performance of the experimental chip is 10-20 times higher than today's models of a family of Core.

Now the public has not demonstrated a prototype 48-core processor, but actually working computer based on it. However, experimental computer case clearly is not limited. Intel is saying that the concept of multi-core, inherent in the 48-core processor, you can use derivatives technology devices, from servers to cell phones.

Adding a new chip cores is now considered the most effective way to improve processor performance without a substantial increase in electricity consumption and increase clock speeds, "thanks" to which CPU gets very hot.