Mac Computing Future--Intel claims 'Era of Tera' in presenting Processor with Teraflop Performance

Intel Corporation researchers have developed the world's first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip not much larger than the size of a finger nail while using less electricity than most of today's home appliances. This is the result of the company's innovative "Tera-scale computing" research aimed at delivering Teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) performance for future personal computers and servers. Technical details of the Teraflops research chip will be presented at the annual Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco.

Tera-scale performance, and the ability to move terabytes of data, will play a pivotal role in future computers with ubiquitous access to the Internet by powering new applications for education and collaboration, as well as enabling the rise of high-definition entertainment on personal computers, servers and handheld devices. For example, artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition – once deemed as science fiction in "Star Trek" shows – could become everyday realities.

Intel has no plans to bring this exact chip designed with floating point cores to market. However, the company's Tera-scale research is instrumental in investigating new innovations in individual or specialized processor or core functions, the types of chip-to-chip and chip-to-computer interconnects required to best move data and, most importantly, how software will need to be designed to best leverage multiple processor cores. This Teraflops research chip offered specific insights in new silicon design methodologies, high-bandwidth interconnects and energy management approaches.

Also remarkable is that this 80-core research chip achieves teraflops performance while consuming only 62 watts, less than many single-core processors of today. [Bill Fox]