At the International Solid State Circuits Conference, Intel is demoing a prototype 80-core processor.
The multi-core processor doesn’t run an x86 instruction set or support any of today’s classic operating systems, but both of these points miss the more immediate value of a multi-core system such as this. There are a whole class of problems where a processor such as this–whether the main processing unit in a system or a complementary component–would be a significant boost to developers and end users. Just a few of these areas are in vision systems, synthesizing video, speech recognition, handwriting/shape recognition and search.
The graphics industry has already stepped in this direction for good reason and maybe with a more generic set of processors we’ll see not only better looking images on our computers, but we’ll see, hear, experience, and interact with our computers in ways that have not been practical to date. That’s the key.
Yes, CPUs from Intel, AMD and others are already going in the multi-core direction. It won’t be too many years before 8 or 16-core processor systems populate our retail shelves. These systems will evolve from our current crop of hardware and software. However, I imagine the larger core systems will target specific problems, at least at first, with specialized hardware and software. The two may eventually merge or may stay separate, much like the graphics processors and main CPU have gone their separate ways. I’m guessing the latter is more likely for the next decade or so, but then again we’ll just have to see.
Which leads to some silly speculation: Which mainstream operating system do you think would be the first to capitalize on a large, multi-core processor–let’s say at least 80 processors? Unix? Windows? or Apple’s Mac? or a Google OS? Hmmm. My vote would be a Unix-derived OS first with maybe Apple providing an early off-the-shelf video/graphics/music editing system using the processor.