Just read this and it looks like Intel will have a fast 16 thread (8 core) chip in 2008. It will be interesting to see how the various vendors trade off the number of cores versus clock speed over the next couple of years. Some will go extreme on the cores side and will pay for that with lower per core clock speeds but higher throughputs potentially or lower power usage.
While systems code like JVM/JIT/GC will likely still perform well on multi-core chips, I doubt application level code will fare as well so we will see two markets evolving, the extreme high performance, low latency side and the normal, latency not such a big deal side. Up to now, the same processors could be used for both but this will change as the market differentiates in to two camps, i.e. lots of cores versus not so many cores.
Comments