t e c h i e - t a l k s ::: technology at its best

Beyond the horizon, a Dodeca-Core cpu exists? (Dodceca - combining form meaning “twelve,” used in the formation of compound words.)

Do you still remember the days when looking for a CPU was a pretty boring and easy task? Look for the highest frequency processor you could find and wa-la! You’ve just got yourself the beast-iest number crunching processor you could find in the market.

Then came along AMD’s 64 bit Athlon processors that killed the competition. The frequency race was called off abruptly when AMD’s 3200, 2.0Ghz processor kicked Intel’s Pentium-4 3.2 Ghz. Thereafter, choosing a CPU is no longer an easy task as there are more criteria too be added into the “look-out-for” list. However, due to the impact that Intel processors had to its consumers, people still had the mindsets that the higher the frequency, the better the CPU (this is not totally wrong by the way). It does make sense if you look at programming wise. The faster the CPU ticks, the more instructions it could service in a given time interval. And amongst CPUs of the same caliber, frequency does matter.

However, comparing CPUs of a different league (Quad vs. duo core for example); it may no longer be a numbers game.  And with the launch of AMD’s 45nm CPU, codenamed Shanghai, the battle for performance CPUs is heating up with prices of duo cores and triple cores dropping as the days past. According to tgdaily,

.. sextuple-core processors have been done, or at least we’ll see the first ones this year.  The real neat stuff comes a few months after, where AMD will finally ditch the “native-core” rhetoric.  Two separate reports sent to DailyTech from AMD partners indicate that Shanghai and its derivatives will also get twin-die per package treatment.

A twin-die Istanbul processor could enable 12 cores in a single package. Each of these cores will communicate to each other via the now-enabled HT3.0 interconnect on the processor

Source: tgdaily.com

With multiple cores, time sharing is no longer constrained to a single processor. Multiple processors are able to handle parts of the running processes, making computing so much more efficient than previously imagined. On top of that, the shrinking components would allow more cores to be packaged in a single die and with a promise of a more cooler & efficient CPU(s). The world of CPU engineering will become more interesting in a couple years to come.