Intel to deliver 48-core research chips

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Last week PCWorld reported that Intel has plans to ship an experimental 48-core chip to researchers by the end of the second quarter

Intel logoDevelopment of the processor is part of Intel’s terascale computing research program. A focus area of the program is to put more cores in a single processor to enable faster computing in devices ranging from mobiles to servers.

…The 48-core processor’s architecture includes improvements that cut memory and communication bottlenecks that affect current x86 chips. For faster data exchange, the chip topology organizes the cores with multiple points to receive and transfer data. Routers between cores facilitate faster data exchange and the architecture is expandable as cores are added. The 48-core chip has 24 small routers between cores, Koehl said.

Each core has on-chip buffers that can instantly exchange data in parallel across all the cores, Koehl said.

More about some of the chip’s features, including power management, in the article.