All eyes on Larrabee

There’s been a bit of talk on the web-o-sphere about a report out of the German tech magazine Hiese.de
that claimed that the Larrabee multi-core processor that Intel was
working on will contain 32 original (well, second generation, but still
20 years old) Pentium cores. In the end, it appears to be just
speculation and Intel was quick to squash the rumors. But the logic
behind the speculation seems plausible.

The old Pentiums where 3
million transistors and with the new GPUs coming out with over a
billion, you pack a lot of cores onto one of those. And I like the
concept. Something old is new again. Simplify and multiply. There are a
lot of transistors in modern CPUs just to handle out of order execution
and try to do as many things at once at the instruction level. But
that’s pretty complicated but made it simple for the programmer. We’ve
gotten pretty good at doing the simple things, why not just take a step
back and use what we know. But, of course, you still need to software
to take advantage of it.

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