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

[Phil Stracchino]

nate at portents.com wrote:
>> 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.

True, but I wouldn't be surprised to find a single SiCortex MIPS64 node
that draws 5.4W can outperform a single 1600MHz Atom core (given
decently parallelized code), and probably two.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
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         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.