Intel Develops Supercomputer Processor on Fingernail

Via ITWire -

Chip maker Intel 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.

The new chip is the result of research aimed at delivering Teraflops 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.

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 PCs, servers and handheld devices. Applications include artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition.

Intel has no plans to bring prototype 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.