8. Intel to Demonstrate 48-Core Microprocessor As a part of its
Tera-Scale Computing Research, Intel Corp. has been showcasing
rather bizarre chips and concepts for a couple of years now. In
early December the firm demonstrated its chip with 48 of fully-
fledged x86 processing engines. A couple of days later the
company announced decision to cancel its first-generation many-
core x86-based Larrabee graphics processor. Even though there is
no direct correlation between the two events, some believe that
the concept chip will influence the future implementations of
Larrabee. The prototype chip – which Intel calls single-chip
cloud computer (SSC) – contains 24 tiles with two IA cores per
each, which results in 48 cores – the largest number ever placed
on a single piece of silicon. Each core can run a separate OS
and software stack and act like an individual compute node that
communicates with other compute nodes over a packet-based
network. Every core sports its own L2 cache and each tile sports
a special router lo