2008-07-10

What would *you* do with a thousand cores?

Anwar Ghuloum's post Unwelcome advice has caused a bit of a stir recently. Probably not in the way he wanted though. The comments are full of questions and doubts about whether they (Intel) can back up their claims of soon-to-come-thousands-of-cores-processors. And, more importantly, if they *can* - programming in itself will be very different from how we do it today so it's meaningless to think about it in terms of how it's done now.

But, regardless of all that... More than a thousand cores in a single processor. What would *you* do with that? One area that I think looks particularly promising is Computer Go. That many cores may well be the tipping point of AI players in Go. Will they finally be able to move up into the (professional) Dan levels?

In the upcoming tournament at the European Go Congress (in Leksand, Sweden) they're provding hardware with 2 cores. If we ignore practical scaling problems for a minute, what would the effect of an additional 998 cores be? Many of the top players today (like MoGo and CrazyStone) rely on "easily" parallellizable statistical methods (see UCT and Monte Carlo methods for more info). And the more playouts you can perform within a given time the better the resulting play. At least in theory.

I may well be underestimating the problem. I know. But it would be very interesting to see how much of an improvement can be made by just adding more raw power.

2 kommentarer:

woolfel sa...

Does that also include 1TB of RAM to go with that 1000 cores? If it does, you could do some really cool agent stuff and set the CPU affinity so it's 1 per client.

Johan Lindberg sa...

Well. Let's hope so. It would be pretty useless I guess if you scale up one place but leave the other ;-)