Data centres are the modern version of the original mainframe computers, taking up vast amounts of space, with racks and racks of servers delivering high-performance computing.
As any engineer will tell you, a mobile phone now has more processing power than a room-filling mainframe of old, with its cost and electricity consumption infinitely leaner.
On Wednesday, Intel showed off a new 48-core chip that could crunch the size of data centres down in a similar way, describing it as a “‘single-chip cloud computer’ that rethinks many of the approaches used in today’s designs for laptops, PCs and servers.”
The new processor is not a product, does not have a name and will be a limited edition of 100 or more made available next year to researchers developing new software applications and programming models.
Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer, told us at a presentation that computing was moving into a “many-core era.”
“The notion we have is: Could you replace potentially a rackful of equipment today with one or a very small number of these high core-count processors?” he said.
Or to be more visionary about it: “The machines we build will be capable of understanding the world around them much as we do as humans, so they will see and hear and they will probably speak and do a number of other things.”
Intel did not have any android robots on display to demonstrate this, only some computer programs demonstrating the speed and energy savings possible with the new chip.
It will have 10 to 20 times the processing engines inside the current Core line-up of processors and consume only as much power as two standard household light bulbs.
Intel’s x86 central processing units (CPUs) have traditionally operated in a sequential fashion in completing their tasks, but the addition of more cores or “brains” allows the kind of powerful parallel processing that is carried out more naturally by graphics processing units (GPUs).
Intel is therefore competing with Nvidia, the graphics chip company, in this area of high-performance computing.
Intel and Microsoft set up two parallel computing research centres at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois last year. Mr Rattner said their researchers would be among the first to get the new chips.
