ACM TechNews

Intel Plans Chip to Boost Computer Performance

Washington Post (08/04/08) P. A6; Whoriskey, Peter

Intel's new Larrabee processor, which features more than 10 processor cores, will boost computer performance by adding more cores instead of increasing the chip's operating frequency. By 2015, the strategy of running chips at increasingly higher frequencies could create products that generate as much heat as a nuclear reactor, according to engineers, so multi-core processing is largely considered the future of computing. "There is a fundamental physics issue we can no longer get around," says Intel's Anwar Ghuloum. "If we kept going as we had been, the heat density on a chip would have equaled the surface of the sun." The first products based on the Larrabee chip are expected to be released in 2009 or 2010. The problem with the multi-core approach is that it will require an equally dramatic shift in software. To utilize the processing power contained in a multi-core chip, software will need to be divided into chucks of instructions that can run in parallel on multiple processors. Once chips with 10 cores are available in consumer products, much of today's existing software may have to be rewritten to take advantage of the extra processing capabilities. New programming languages are being developed and technology leaders are encouraging university computer science departments to strengthen their parallel processing coursework.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/03/
AR2008080302021.html

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