Author: Graham Laight
Date: 04:28:52 03/03/00
Go up one level in this thread
On March 02, 2000 at 10:08:43, Robert Hyatt wrote: >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. It can't be impossible - just look at the example of animal brains (including the one you're using right now to interpret this text). Would you say that an animal brain (or silicon neural network) is doing more "memory sharing" or more "message passing"? Probably a combination of the two. Anyway - to get back to traditional silicon computers: my suggestion is to use a hiararchy instead of shared memory. A simple example of how this could be done would be as follows: processor 1 is given a task. It delegates parts of that task to processors 2, 3, and 4. Processor 2 delegates part of its work to processors 5, 6, and 7. Processor 3 delegates part of its work to processors 8, 9, and 10 - and so on. Once this has been perfected, I have some even more advanced ideas on how to progress from there - but I'd like to see what people think of this idea first. I suppose this suggestion would classify as "message passing" - but each processor would only have to pass messages to a small number of other processors, so it would still be efficient. -g >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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