Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 07:08:43 03/02/00
Go up one level in this thread
On March 02, 2000 at 07:04:58, Graham Laight wrote: >On March 01, 2000 at 23:37:30, Tom Kerrigan wrote: > >>On March 01, 2000 at 07:37:55, Graham Laight wrote: >> >>>Pentium processors are a big and competitive market. Trouble is, I don't think >>>they're the best architechture to put together in large numbers on the same >>>motherboard. >> >>Intel has been hell-bent on making the world's fastest single processor. >> >>They seem to be ignoring the fact that several fast processors can be put on one >>chip. >> >>If they were so inclined, I don't think it would be a problem to put 4 >>(original) Pentiums on one chip. And there would probably be some space left >>over for L2 cache. >> >>AMD is taking this approach, but I don't know when they will have a product >>ready, or how much it will cost. There's no manufacturing reason for such a >>product to cost more than a single processor, but I assume they will milk it for >>all it's worth. >> >>-Tom > >Thanks to everyone for replying - and they're all good, interesting answers. > >However, what I failed to make clear was this: I wasn't talking about two, four, >or even eight processors - I was talking about THOUSANDS of processors! > >I have read articles in the computer press about companies making multiprocessor >boards of this order of magnitude in a low cost way. > >I think we'll have to wait a long time for the Intel architecture to scale up to >that kind of level. Hence my remark that this is a marketing issue rather than a >technical one. > >-g It isn't so easy to do. IE the best architecture has shared memory. In a 32-processor Cray T932 machine, 70% of the _total_ cost of the machine is in the hardware that connects the CPUs to Memory. 70%. Leaving 30% for what most would agree are very expensive CPUs. The other approach is message passing. This is _much_ less efficient, and using "thousands of cpus to play chess" is not just difficult, but _very_ difficult. I doubt that 'clustering' like that is going to work. And shared memory for thousands of processors would mean that 99.9999999999% of the total cost of the hardware would be in the interconnect. That machine would cost billions of dollars.
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