by Douglas Eadline, Ph.D.
“Intel has a new 48-core experimental processor. I want to discuss the technology, but first I need to rant a bit. The PR contrived headline calls it a “Single-chip Cloud Computer.” Arrgh, they are even using an acronym calling it the SCC chip. Where to begin? First, when this project was started, I doubt the hardware engineers at Intel said, “Hey let’s build a processor for the cloud. You know that nebulous concept that is years away.” Second, I am sure they have good technical reasons for designing this chip, but sorry Intel PR geniuses I doubt it was for “The Cloud.” Yes, “The Cloud,” that vague but ever so trendy name for timeshare/grid/Internet-computing that gets tacked on to every technology news story I read. Let me try and help you out here. Computers can run almost anywhere, in an office, a house, a car, even on an airplane while flying through a cloud, but, you don’t “run a cloud on a processor” unless you are simulating them, which by the way some HPC people are apt to do. Please stop using the word “Cloud” to grab headlines. Intel makes cool stuff, let that be the story. There now I feel better.

Let’s move on to the real issue — parallel computing. In case you have not noticed, processors have more cores than they used to. In some case eight or sixteen times more cores. If this did not surprise you, then maybe this will. Designers cannot continue adding cores the way they have in the past, which is in an SMP cache coherent kind of way.”

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