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I've just read the news, a 100-core CPU was released. Though the news is two years ago.

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I'm wondering whether the size of the 100-core CPU is more or less just the same as Intel CPUs.

The nano-wire is already so small, as the Moore's Law seems to be dead in foreseeable future, the size of a core will be reach a limit then, how can too many cores built into one chip?

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I read it was up to 1000. – jscott Jan 4 '11 at 1:33
The possibilities are endless... / Nothing is impossible... – squircle Jan 4 '11 at 1:33
100-core CPUs are neat and all, but how is this related to system administration? Your question is probably more appropriate on a electronics or chip manufacturing forum. – Zoredache Jan 4 '11 at 1:34
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Over 9000, of course. – SilverbackNet Jan 4 '11 at 1:37
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"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" -- Seymour Cray – Aki Jan 4 '11 at 8:11
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Moore's Law is far from dead. Read up on semiconductor device fabrication. We are only at 32nm right now, and the road map has already been laid for 22nm, 16nm, and 11nm. Moore's Law will not die until the PNP or NPN of a transistor are each one atom thick... and it may not even die then (if we can learn to manipulate quarks that is).

With that said we can expect to see as many cores on a processor as will fit in die space x given manufacturing process y. Hundreds of cores will probably be mainstream in the very near future, and thousands may be on the horizon as well.

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Strictly speaking, the transistors in modern CPUs use gates, not junctions. Your point does stand though. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Jan 4 '11 at 1:57
@Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Yeah, I just didn't want to make the subject too cloudy :) – typoknig Jan 4 '11 at 2:07
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I've been told by an AMD engineer that the scales we are at are starting to see quantum effects such as electron tunneling that is limiting how small you can go. The solution has been, as you have seen, to scale out (rather than down) with multiple cores. – Keith Jan 4 '11 at 2:13
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@theUnhandledException I'll post back in 10 years :) – typoknig Aug 31 '11 at 1:41
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@typoking That's worth a +1. :) – theUnhandledException Aug 31 '11 at 2:24
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up vote 1 down vote

If I write a number from my imagination or if I find and cite a research paper and someone reads this 10 years from now, he will probably laugh at bad predictions.

So I'll just say that the number will be limited by Amdahl's law and specific needs of target market.

A bit of clarification on the needs part: To put it simply, compare today's GPUs and CPUs. GPUs have large number of relatively limited cores, which is OK for graphics processing, while each CPU core can do much more complex operations.

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Agreed. See the link for the 1000-core processor in one of the comments, it's effectively a hardware MPEG-decoder. We may well end up with a very large number of very simple cores – j-g-faustus Jan 4 '11 at 5:50
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