What if smartphones could run as fast as a mainstream desktop computer or even a supercomputer? If you have a generation smartphone with a quad-core processor, you may soon think it is a supercomputer. But now, Intel plans to bring 48-core processors to the field of mobile devices, making the “quad-core” that you have in your hands look obsolete.
Almost exactly three years ago, Intel had revealed to be working on a new type of embedded processor consists of 48 core chips. Intel now seems to have decided what to do with this monster — to work on the future of CPU for smartphones and tablets.
Researchers at Intel have begun work on multicore systems to manage mobile devices, such as smartphones and Ultrabook, in the near future. It will take at least five to 10 years before you actually see, on the market, mobile devices enhanced by this super processor.
Today, many smartphones already use multicore chips. However, these multicore CPUs essentially consist of a dual- or quad-core processor with a GPU, yet not too powerful. Having a chip with 48 cores could really completely change the rules of the game. Researchers are working to understand how best to use so many cores for a device.
“Generally, a processor with one core handles a workload, one after another. With more cores, you can divide the workload between them,” says Herrero, one of the researchers who are working on these new processors. “For example, you could encrypt an email and use other applications at the same time. Even today you can do it, but these operations are to be carried out long, because the few cores on mobile devices must share the resources.”
Tanausu Ramirez, another researcher at Intel, said that, if someone wants to watch a video in HD on a mobile device, the 48-core chip would be able to use different cores to decode different video frames at the same time, giving a unique, smooth experience.
Ramirez also said that instead of having a core that works at consuming a lot of energy, more cores can work in parallel on several projects, while consuming less. The chip can also take the energy, and then divide and distribute it among the different applications.
Today, many computation-intensive tasks are outsourced to the cloud, such as the analysis of speech input through Siri and Google Now; they are both done on the servers of the provider. With the 48-core-based processors, where Intel is working, the processes could be done directly on the phone, even if there is no connection to the network.
“I think the desire to move to more natural interfaces to make the interaction much more human-like is really going to drive the computational requirements,” said Intel CTO Justin Rattner. “Having large numbers of cores to generate very high performance levels is the most energy-efficient way to deliver those performance levels.”
Future smartphone jobs, such as the packaging of large HD video files or the constant maintaining augmented reality environment, can be carried out with appropriate processors easily and simultaneously.