Monday, February 12, 2007

Teraflop chip hints at the future


The chip is the size of a fingernail. 11 years ago...




11 years ago, the same computing power required 2,000 square feet...!

from the bbc:

A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflop) has been unveiled by Intel.

The Teraflop chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm.

The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it.

The challenge is to find a way to program the many cores simultaneously.

Current desktop machines have up to four separate cores, while the Cell processor inside the PlayStation 3 has eight (seven of them useable). Each core is effectively a programmable chip in its own right.

But to take advantage of the extra processing power, programmers need to gives instructions to each core that work in parallel with one another.

team nutty could definitely use some of that....

No comments: