Back in January I sort of predicted that by 2007, a common question won’t be how fast your processor is, but how many cores it has. I think my prediction is starting to look more and more like a reality. I don’t think I wrote about it, but we purchased new machines for the office a while ago, and they each have dual core processors. This last week saw the official launch of Intel’s new Core 2 Duo chips, and as the name suggests, they have more than one core.
But if you think two cores is good, wait another three to four years:
I have to say I can’t remember performance gains anywhere near 16x in only four years. Comparing a 2002 Pentium 4 3.06 GHz with a Core 2 Extreme 2.93 GHz will give you a two to five fold increase – if most. 16x more performance by 32 cores in 2010 versus today’s two cores, should it come true, equals linear scaling, which means that performance would double with the core count. Many of you will say this is utterly impossible, because even sustaining the clock speed levels at doubled core count might be difficult – and I agree, unless you start to think out of the box.
Yep it seems Intel is working on having 32 cores on a chip by 2010, a project code-named “Keifer”. According to some sources, each core would run at 2 GHz, which is slower than today’s fastest chips, but adds up when there’s 32 of them. No word on how much power this beast might devour.
Now 2010 is still a ways off, and Intel has been known to change course in the past, but if they get this project completed according to plan, the future for computing performance looks very bright indeed. That and AMD is going to have some catching up to do.
Read: Tom’s Hardware
MasterMaq's Blog 