[geeks] anyone know about this? 72-core, 48GB computer?

[nate at portents.com]

> The Atom CPU consumes 4-5 Watts, this core uses one-fifth of that?
>
> Are they Transmete Atoms?
>
> Lionel

You mean Transmeta Atoms?  No.  Wikipedia says that each node is a
system-on-a-chip, 6 cores per chip, 32k I and 32k D caches per core, 256k
shared L2 per node (i.e. shared by all cores).  There were two revisions
of nodes, one with 500Mhz cores, the other with 700Mhz cores.  The SoC
also has two DDR2 memory channels and PCIe 8x as the system interconnect,
which keeps things pretty simple overall.

Now compare that to the Atom 230, which runs at 1600Mhz, has 32k I cache
and 24k D cache, 512k L2 cache, 32-bit as well as 64-bit instruction sets,
MMX, SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 support, HyperThreading, and macro-ops to
micro-ops translation (though it is considerably streamlined from other
current x86 cores, with a closer to 1:1 translation).  In the end, despite
being fairly stripped down for x86, it's still beefier than the MIPS64
cores used in the SiCortex SoC.

- Nate