IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 04/12/2009

Intel showcase 48-core x86 processor

"Cloud computing" is quite the buzzword around the industry at the moment and as its importance grows so does the need for systems, and in particular processors, that are better suited to such tasks.آ Enter Intel's "Bangalore" CPU design, sporting forty-eight x86 cores on what the company are now dubbing as a "single chip cloud computer".

The 48 cores are arranged in 24 "titles" - what you can think of as 24 separate dual-core processors.آ These tiles are then connected via a 2D mesh network that can support up to 256 GB/s of bandwidth!آ There are four integrated DDR3 memory controllers (though no mention of how many channels each controller is) that can house as much as 64GB of total memory.

Things get interesting here - Intel is saying that they have removed hardware cache coherency which effectively means each "tile" will be completely separate in what it stores in local L2 cache.آ All cache communication between cores and tiles will thus be handled by the mesh data communication system and the dedicated "message buffer" on each tile.

Power efficiency is very important when it comes to server environments so Intel has made some impressive steps there.آ Each processor will have 8 different voltage "islands" and 28 different frequency "islands" - this means that each tile can run at its own frequency while each collection of four tiles will run at a different voltage.آ This should potentially allow the CPU power consumption to scale with compute very well.

PC Perspective has more information on Intel's presentation.

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AMD's Radeon HD 5670 revealed?

We already know about AMD's high-end and mainstream DirectX 11 graphics boards, but what will 2010 bring system builders looking to supply the value end of the market?آ HEXUS has pictures and specifications purported to depict one of those very graphics boards, in the form of the Radeon HD 5670.

Codenamed Redwood, the card has been rumoured to be on course for a Q1 2010 launch, and leaked specifications suggest a GPU clocked at 775MHz and 1GB of GDDR5 memory operating at an effective 4,000MHz.

We'll have to take the specification with a pinch of salt, of course, but leaked details also point out 400 shaders, 16 ROPs, a 64GB/s of memory bandwidth and a texture fillrate of 103.3 GTexels/s.

According to the poster, AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5670 scores 859 on the Unigine benchmark, a 23 per cent increase when compared to the previous-generation ATI Radeon HD 4670.

Check out the full details (images included) right here.

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