December 2009 Archives

We're on the Pine Trail - the as yet unreleased, next-gen low-power platform from Intel.

Engadget reports that a German website CarTFT has got hold of a couple of Intel's latest processor / motherboard combos - intended primarily for nettops, it says -  and published some early benchmarks. See - Intel's Atom D510, D410 processors get benchmarked

An interesting comment piece on The Register, from Timothy Prickett Morgan, about how the mothballing of "Larrabee" - the x86-based hybrid multi-core CPU and GPU - points to good HPC times for Nvidia: Intel Larrabee letdown leaves HPC to Nvidia's Fermi

He says Intel has never been particularly precise about what "Larrabee" chips were, so it is hard to know exactly what it is we will be missing. Or indeed what we can ever expect from when it finally markets discrete graphics chips that can also be used for number-crunching in servers and workstations...

He continues:

Intel Labs has demonstrated a 48-core processor which could have around "10 to 20 times the processing engines inside today's Intel Core-branded processors", writes Electronics Weekly editor, Richard WIlson.

Dubbed a "single-chip cloud computer", the chip has 1.3 billion transistors, making it the biggest processor Intel has ever developed.

It is just an experimental device, but Intel Labs has created a working device which ran real-world applications in a demonstration in California this week.