In another of my late night Internet readings (not for what you think), I came across a few press articles revisiting Intel’s Polaris Prototype chip. It was a chip they demonstrated in 2006 that had 80 cores. At that time they spoke about releasing a chip with 80 cores within 5 years .
Fast-forward to this past Tuesday, Michael Dell brought up the 80-core chip again . This time it was suggested we could see that chip as soon as 2010 (btw, I just checked newegg.com and they’re not taking pre-orders yet). A Central Processing Unit with 80-cores.
That number brings me back to my first PC while still in college: a 386 @ 40MHz (yes for the younger readers, that’s MEGAhertz.)  It had 256KB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk. Back then, I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a day where a single chip can perform more than a teraflop. Now there’s one coming soon to a desktop near you. Intel’s own website shows some great pictures of the chip and compare it to the first computer they used to do a teraflop in 1996, a computer of 10,000 Pentium Pro’s @ 200 MHz using 500kW of power and an additional 500kW of power for cooling. In contrast, the 80-core chip performs 1.01 teraflops with just 62 watts of power. Amazing.
So why do I mention this on my blog? I often ask customers today who have never used virtualization (yes, they still exist), what applications in your environment use all 8 cores on a dual-socket quad core box? Occasionally I’ll get a response about their Oracle or Exchange implementation. I mention how the 6-core Dunningtons are out today and the 8-core Nehalem’s are not far from now. When your running 32-cores in a server how many apps will utilize that hardware? Virtualization is the only one. AMD and Intel’s "arms race" of processors has left the average software application in the dust. Most applications in customer’s environments don’t even remotely push the CPU capacity in the datacenter. One of the few remaining ways to utilize these types of processors is virtualization. If you have not virtualized as much as you can, keep working towards it. Remember that the 4 or 6 core CPU you purchased this year will be end-of-life in 3-5 years. Perhaps the replacement machine might just have one of the 80-core powerhouses in it. Then you will be able to migrate all of your virtual machines to it, without having to modify a thing inside them.
I remember that 386 I purchased for $2,000 in 1991. That was a mere 17 years ago. I’ll be retiring in about 25 years or so. I wonder what we’ll be running on then?
Recent Comments