Quote:I thought the prospect of quad-core tablet computers was exciting.
Then I saw Intel's latest -- a 1 teraflop chip, with more than 50 cores, that Intel unveiled today, running it on a test machine at the SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle.
That means my kids may take a teraflop laptop to college -- if their grades don't suffer too much having access to 50-core video game consoles.
It wasn't that long ago that Intel was boasting about the first supercomputer with sustained 1 teraflop performance. That was in 1997, on a system with 9,298 Pentium II chips that filled 72 computing cabinets.
Now Intel has squeezed that much performance onto a matchbook-sized chip, dubbed "Knights Corner," based on its new "Many Integrated Core" architecture, or MIC. (Earlier I referred to it as "Knights Ferry," which is its development kit.)
It was designed largely in the Portland area and has just started manufacturing.
"In 15 years that's what wee've been able to do. That is stupendous. You're witnessing the 1 teraflop barrier busting," Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Intel's technical computing group, said at an unveiling ceremony. (He holds up the chip here)
A single teraflop is capable of a trillion floating point operations per second.