IDF Spring 2005 - Day 3: Justin Rattner's Keynote, Predicting the Future
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 3, 2005 3:17 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
A Fully Virtualized Platform
Rattner also talked about fully virtualizing the platform, showing off a demo where two virtual machines both had access to Intel's integrated graphics core. It would be interesting to see this sort of technology implemented by ATI and NVIDIA in their GPUs:
A Parallel Programming Model
A major demand of extremely parallel architectures (thread level) is the need for parallel compilers and management of threads, Rattner also talked about one method of properly implementing software to take advantage of multi-core CPUs.
By using a software run-time management layer, load balancing between the multiple cores in a 2015 CPU is achieved. Individual cores can be instructed to power down based on the application's requirements, which will definitely be necessary when you're dealing with 10s or 100s of cores on a chip.
Intel demoed an example of such a management layer with a multi-core network processor, showing certain cores going to sleep when they weren't used.
Final Words
All in all Rattner's keynote was a bit long winded, but an excellent first attempt - the vision he presented of 2015 was quite realistic, and we've got a lot more to talk about from an architectural level in our next article...
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HardwareD00d - Thursday, March 3, 2005 - link
Wishful thinking for Intel. Who the heck knows what will happen in 10 years. The earth will probably be taken over by Soviet Russia and Yakov Smirnov will be president.When I hear about this stuff I keep thinking back to the Prescott and how it was going to scale to 5 GHz + . Yeah right.
Dualboy24 - Thursday, March 3, 2005 - link
#2 The Super Resolution technique would work only with a video signal as stated a 3 second low resolution one. It would not work with a single still low resolution image. The software just compares the pixels and motion between frames to generate a single clean frame. 3 seconds can mean 30 to 90 frames for analysis in total depending on the rate of capture. Still very impressive how clear it made it.Impressive stuff.. I cant wait till 2015... I want 100 cores now! I bet developer tools and compilers will start to take advantage of huge multitrheading.
ZobarStyl - Thursday, March 3, 2005 - link
Anyone think the idea of sticking two cores directly on top of one another for Intel's current processor line is a little bit ambitious? We're already curious about how 2 Prescotts side by side will fare, but one on top of another, how can that dissipate such a tremendous amount of heat?quanta - Thursday, March 3, 2005 - link
Maybe it was just Anand's screenshot, but the 'Super Resolution' technique looks like someone making up the whole thing when the source text is not supposed to be readable. Perfect for tampering with evidence. :)coldpower27 - Thursday, March 3, 2005 - link
Interesting stuff.