Intel's Teraflops-Capable Chip

Intel has designed an experimental computer chip with 80 separate processing engines (or cores), that promises to perform calculations as quickly as an entire data center - while consuming as much energy as a light bulb. The world's biggest chipmaker announced today that 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.

"ASCI Red", the first computer to benchmark at Teraflops in 1996, took up more than 600 square metres at Sandia National Laboratories and used nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors running at 200MHz and consuming 500kW of power. It required an additional 500 kW just to keep the room cool.

Intel's latest chip is still in the research phase, but it marks an important breakthrough for an industry obsessed with obtaining the highest amount of performance for the lowest energy consumption. The chip’s design is meant to exploit a new generation of manufacturing technology the company introduced last month (our past posting). Intel said that it had changed the basic design of transistors in such a way that it would be able to continue to shrink them to smaller sizes — offering lower power and higher speeds — for at least a half-decade or more.

Technology experts praised Intel for devising a clever way to get 80 core calculating engines onto a single slice of silicon. The cores used on the research chip are much smaller and simpler than those used in Intel's latest line of chips, which have two or four cores. The research chip has 100 million transistors on it, about one-third the number on Intel's current line of chips.

The first uses for the chips would likely be in corporate data centers, supercomputers, communications infrastructures and for heavy-duty financial and scientific research. Intel suggested one possible consumer use: a program that intelligently monitors a televised sporting event and automatically identifies and compiles key highlights like a slam dunk or a home run by a favourite player based on the spectator's preferences. Other uses could be artificial intelligence, realistic 3-D computer modeling and real-time speech recognition.

Already, computer networking companies and the makers of PC graphics cards are moving to processor designs that have hundreds of computing engines, but only for special applications. For example, Cisco Systems now uses a chip called Metro with 192 cores in its high-end network routers. Last November Nvidia introduced its most powerful graphics processor, the GeForce 8800, which has 128 cores.

The Intel demonstration suggests that the technology may come to dominate mainstream computing in the future. While the chip is not compatible with Intel’s current chips, the company said it had already begun designing a commercial version that would essentially have dozens or even hundreds of Intel-compatible microprocessors laid out in a tiled pattern on a single chip.