I'm not sure where to post this, thought it would be fun to post this in one of those forums...
I just got my hands on this CPU, it is very mysterious, and it has a kind of blue glow around it, like it is radiating something. I identified it as a Socket ... processor and when I hooked it up the glow grows more intense and when I disconnect it the glow decays slowly into the state it was when I first saw it. The power consumtion is rather low, I have not yet managed to fully load the CPU but at most it was consuming 25 watts and when idle it is barely a watt of power consumption.
When booting up Windows the operating system identifies 64 cores which is amazing. At first the system only identified 2MB of level 2 cache for each core but after some tweaking and "debugging" it turns out that each core has a whopping 128MB of L1 cache, there's no hierarchy and it seems like it all is right in the cores. So there is a total of 8 Gigs of cache mem right in the cores, what should I use RAM for, I wonder.
Doing stuff such as zipping or rarring a file is quite fast like a Core i7 on steroids but it's not amazingly fast and I guess this is a clock speed issue, and a programming issue for that matter. I have not yet tried to overclock it and frankly I'm not sure how to reach the maximum speeds as that would require some odd voltage feed which I don't know.
No matter how many programs I run the system reports almost no CPU utilization on any of the cores, the only lag that occurs is when I overload the system bus because it can only take so much. It's obvious that I have not yet found a way to fully utilize the capacity of it, or maybe the system is not reporting properly.
I would like to try things out but I'm afraid to break it even though it seems quite robust, and maybe it even is insensitive to ESD and high voltages, but I don't dare try, at least not yet. Maybe it supports more instruction sets than the x86/x64, it seems to be able to execute whatever I throw at it. I don't fully understand the architecture of this piece and there seems to be more than what the system can identify in it.
Who made this? What the hell is it? What is it made of? And how did they do it? I dare not take this apart to see what's inside.