Intel has demonstrated an energy efficient 80-core chip
with supercomputing performance.
The chip is a result of the company’s “Tera-scale computing”
research aimed at delivering Teraflops - or trillions of
calculations per second -performance for future PCs 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.
Intel said 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, powering new applications
for education and collaboration, as well as enabling the rise of
high-definition entertainment on PCs, servers and handheld
devices.
Intel said using such chips would support artificial
intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games,
multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition.
The Teraflops research chip - Intel has no plans to bring the
exact design to market - will support the firm’s approach to new
silicon design methods, high-bandwidth interconnection solutions
and energy management.
Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer, said, “This chip
points the way to the near future, when Teraflops-capable designs
will be commonplace and reshape what we can all expect from our
computers and the internet at home and in the office.”
The first time Teraflops performance was achieved was in 1996,
on the ASCI Red Supercomputer built by Intel for the Sandia
National Laboratory.
That computer took up more than 2,000 square feet, was powered
by nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed over 500
kilowatts of electricity. Intel’s research chip achieves this same
performance on a tiny multi-core chip.
The 80-core research chip also achieves teraflops performance
while consuming only 62 watts – less than many single-core
processors today.
The chip features an innovative tile design in which smaller
cores are replicated as “tiles,” making it easier to design a chip
with many cores.
The Teraflops chip also features a mesh-like “network-on-a-chip”
architecture that allows super-high bandwidth communications
between the cores and is capable of moving Terabits of data per
second inside the chip.
The Intel research around the chip also investigated methods to
power cores on and off independently, so only the ones needed to
complete a task are used, thus providing more energy
efficiency.
Related article:
IBM joins race to build new generation of chips
Link to Intel
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