Monday, February 12, 2007
Intel Announces Super-Chip
Posted by Jason Dunn in "NEWS" @ 11:29 AM
"Intel Corp. has designed a computer chip that promises to perform calculations as quickly as an entire data centre — while consuming as much energy as a light bulb. The world's biggest chipmaker said Sunday it developed a programmable processor that can perform about a trillion calculations per second, or deliver a performance of 1.01 teraflops. It accomplishes this feat while consuming 62 watts of power when the chip is running at a frequency of 3.16 gigahertz. A close-up view of an Intel 80-Core Teraflops Research Chip wafer. (Intel) A similarly powerful supercomputer in 1996 at Sandia National Laboratories took up more than 2,000 square feet, used nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed more than 500 kilowatts of electricity."
This chip is in still in the R&D phase, but it sound extremely promising, even if only some of the breakthroughs they've achieved make their way into consumer-level CPUs. CPUs might have caught up with the basic tasks like email and Web access, but until I can encode video at 10x to 20x real-time, I don't think I'll feel like CPUs are quite fast enough. ;-)
This chip is in still in the R&D phase, but it sound extremely promising, even if only some of the breakthroughs they've achieved make their way into consumer-level CPUs. CPUs might have caught up with the basic tasks like email and Web access, but until I can encode video at 10x to 20x real-time, I don't think I'll feel like CPUs are quite fast enough. ;-)
