During Hot Chips 2023, Intel showcased a brand new RISC-based processor design with 8 cores and 528 threads. There are several motivations that drove Intel to create such a unique chip design. The first is, of course, a crazy demand for parallel computing capability, as well as being able to handle some specific workloads that lead to underutilization of existing hardware, most importantly cache.66 threads per core
For highly parallel computing and intensive workloads, Intel has developed a new CPU with 8 cores and 528 threads. An example of these workloads is DARPA’s petabyte-scale graphics analytics workload HIVE program. To handle these workloads, DARPA was developing the Graph Analytics processor in 2021 that offers 1000x Perf/W over traditional computing.
Intel’s solution drops a total of 66 threads per core, with 192KB of cache and 4MB of SRAM per core. On the other hand, this processor is not X86 based, it is based on RISC architecture. Leveraging silicon photonics for networking, this processor uses a chipset-like design with EMIB interconnect to connect optical chips to the main CPU die.
The CPU, manufactured in the TSMC 7nm FinFET process, has a total of 27.6 billion transistors. The number of transistors per core is 1.2 billion. The processor, which will use the 3275 BGA socket platform, can be scaled up to 16 sockets. Thus, 120 cores and 8448 threads will be obtained. The platform will also support up to 512GB of DRAM.A demo shown by Intel also details the power and clock speeds (Fmax) of the CPU. This particular 8-core processor has a TDP of 75W and a large part of its power budget is used by photonics. According to Intel, the cores themselves use 21 percent, or about 16W, of the total energy budget. Saying that the processor is balanced around 3.35-3.5 GHz with 35-55W power, Intel claims that it achieves linear performance as the number of cores increases by 10 times.
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