Microsoft wants Intel to build 16 core Atom chip

Microsoft has asked Intel to develop a 16-core version of its low power Atom chip for use in servers, part of a wider effort to reduce power consumption in its massive data centres, a Microsoft executive said Thursday.

There’s a “huge opportunity” to improve energy efficiency by using servers based on small, low-power chip designs such as Intel’s Atom and Advanced Micro Devices’ Bobcat, said Dileep Bhandarkar, a distinguished engineer with Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services, which runs the company’s data centres.

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Intel is preparing a 1000-core processor

According to Timothy Mattson, scientific expert Intel, speaking at the conference Supercomputing Conference 2010 in New Orleans in the U.S., it is based on a scalable architecture 48-core processor and is based concept chip with 1000 cores working. Mattson said that on the scalability of the 1000 nuclear chips can match the entire datacenter in use today. Read more

1000 core processor ? This is not new because Scottish Scientists recently created 1000-Core Processor on a Single FPGA Chip (Read more). This gave me the feeling that supercomputing era is back. But this hardware must be very expensive because FPGA is never cheap. So, for any one who are looking for a powerful and cheap multi-core processor, why don’t consider GPUs. Nvidia is now has 448 core chip and ATI has GPU with up to 1000 cores. Although, there are limitations on writing programs running on GPU, using GPUs is big shot if we are short in budget.

Anyway, I hope that this Intel 1000-core processor will come soon.