The history of processors starts and ends with the x86 and ARM architectures for the average user, but in the server world there are other options that give rise to chips with impressive potential. One of those options is the new Pitón processor created by Princeton University, which packs a total of 25 cores. Its design is based on the OpenSPARC specification, which, besides being open source, is relatively easy to expand. At Princeton, they already envision a server with eight thousand of these processors, accumulating 200 thousand cores.
A 25-core processor that scales
If we're talking about a processor with 25 cores, we definitely need additional context. After all, Intel released a server processor with 22 cores and 44 processing threads (4,600 dollars at that moment), which is usually installed in pairs, thus doubling the available cores. So it's logical that at first glance nobody is surprised. However, flexibility is critical in servers. Increasing parallelism without raising costs or energy consumption is a kind of 'Holy Grail' among hardware developers, and it requires looking beyond what Intel delivers. That's how we arrive at the new Pitón processor (not the snake, but the peg to scale), created by Princeton University.
Design and manufacturing
The name Pitón refers to the versatility of the design, since it can 'scale' to higher instances by adding more cores and more processors until reaching levels similar to a supercomputer. The processor has a total of 460 million transistors under a 32-nanometer manufacturing node (Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer come to mind). Although the chip design belongs to Princeton, manufacturing was carried out by IBM, with funds from the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and our friends at DARPA. According to professor David Wentzlaff, one of the project leaders, the Pitón architecture based on the open OpenSPARC specification is so flexible that thousands of cores could be added to a single chip, adding up to 500 million in a data center (something like 200 thousand cores per server, spread across 2,500 servers).
Efficiency and cloud
The official announcement does not mention the energy consumption (estimated or exact) of the cores in Pitón, but it does indicate a 20 percent increase in efficiency compared to a traditional core, thanks to its ability to recognize similar operations at the processor level, reorganize those instances and execute identical instructions consecutively. Needless to say, Princeton University and its sponsors clearly aim to optimize the efficiency of infrastructure for 'the cloud', perhaps with "military-scientific" applications initially, and then tempt the big players in the market.
