At what rate are the number of cores per CPU increasing?

I'm designing a system that will be on-line in 2016 and run on commodity 1U or 2U server boxes. I'd like to und开发者_高级运维erstand how parallel the software will need to be so I'd like to estimate the number of cores per physical machine. I'm not interested in more exotic hardware like video game console processors, GPUs or DSPs. I could extrapolate based on when chips where issued by Intel or AMD, but this historical information seems scarce.

Thanks.

I found the following charts from Design for Manycore Systems:

As the great computer scientist Yogi Berra said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.". Given the relative recency of multicore systems, I think you're right to be wary of extrapolations. Still, you need a number to aim for.

M. Spinelli's graphs are very valuable, and (I think) have the benefit of being based on real plans out to 2014. Other than that, if you want a simple, easly calculatable and defensible number, I'd take as a starting point the number of cores in current (say) 2U systems at your price point (high range systems -- 24-32 cores at $15k; mid-range 12-16 cores at $8k, lower-end 8-12 core at $5k). Then note that Moore's law suggests 8-16x as many transistors per unit silicon in 2016 as now, and that on current trends, these mainly go into more cores. That suggests 64-512 cores per node depending on how much you're spending on each -- and these numbers are consistent with the graphs Matt Spinelli posted above.

Cores per physical machine doesn't seem to be a particularly good metric, I think. We haven't really seen that number grow in particularly non-linear ways, and many-core hardware has been available COTS since the 90's (though it was relatively specialized at that point). If your task is really that parallel, quadrupling the number of cores shouldn't change it that much. We've always had the option of faster-but-fewer-cores, which should still be available to you in 6 years if you find that you don't scale well with the current number of cores.

If your application is really embarrassingly parallel, why are you unwilling to consider GPU solutions?

How quickly do you plan to rotate the hardware? Leave old machines till they die, or replace them proactively as they start to slow the cluster down? How many machines are we talking about? What kind of interconnect technology are you considering? For many cluster applications that is the limiting factor.

The drdobbs article above is not a bad analysis, but I think it misses the point just a tad. It's going to be a significant while before many mainstream apps can take advantage of really parallel general compute hardware (and many tasks simply can't be parallelized much), and when they do, they'll be using graphics cards and (to a less extent) soundcards as the specialized hardware they use to do it.