Intel Demonstrates Programmable 48-Core Chip [Processors]

The cores aren't terribly powerful (described as being like lower-end Atom processors) but hey...it's got 48 of them, and it's programmable.

Dubbed as the 'Single-chip Cloud Computer' (SCC), the 1.3-billion transistor processor one ups it's 80-core Polaris predecessor because it can run standard x86 software. So far, it has successfully booted Windows and Linux during demonstrations.
Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner explained what he envisions for the future of these superchips:

'The machine will be able of understanding the world around them much as humans do,' Rattner said. 'They will see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble humanlike capabilities, and will demand as a result very (powerful) computing capability.'

Speaking of powerful computing, this development comes only a couple of weeks after physicists demonstrated their first programmable quantum processor.
[Gizmodo via Intel via CNET]

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50-core processor brings us one step closer to the Singularity [Intel]

You're looking into the eye of a monstrous processing beast. Intel just showed off this 50-core processor it's calling 'Knights Corner' an energy-efficient 22-nanometer processor that will somehow shoehorn more than 50 cores onto a single chip. Sheesh, and we thought 12 cores was mind-blowing.

Intel, you're teasing us — no release date was announced. But as soon as this baby's unleashed, computers will be able to do lots more things at once — in this case, 50 processes at the same time.

Meanwhile, programmers will need to know how to write software that can be efficiently multi-tasked by this 50-headed beast, so Intel's now seeding a few developer kits to get code writers working on this multi-headed hydra. When they do, computers will be a lot faster, one step closer to the Singularity, when computers are as smart as humans.

[DVICE via Electronista]

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AMD's Plan to Take Back Laptops: The Llano "APU" [Processors]

If you want a laptop with graphics performance that isn't totally embarrassing, you're pretty much stuck with some combination of Intel and Nvidia gear. Now, finally, the AMD Llano, a CPU/GPU combo, or 'APU', could give us a serious alternative.
AMD running with the 'Application Processor Unit' name isn't as gimmicky as it sounds, because the Llano is genuinely unique: It's four processing cores and a DX11-capable GPU on a single processor die. In simpler terms, this means that AMD has created a tidy little system on a chip, aimed at a few portable markets. In the simplest terms, they've shrunk laptop graphics and processing into a single chip, which saves power and space.

So! Not much is known about the Llano right now, but we can pick out some broad themes. The chip's power regulation is novel, monitoring specific chip functions to gauge power draw rather than sensors. The graphics capabilities, though still generally a mystery, wouldn't have to be very good at all to trump Intel's lame integrated graphics. In other words, as Ars notes, this could be the first real baby of the still torrid AMD/ATI marriage, and the start of an ATI comeback, at least in laptops.

Or, given that we're not expected to see these processors in products until 2011, when everything could be completely different, it could be none of these things.
[Gizmodo via Ars Technica]

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