Four Core Processor to Bring Tera Ops

panhandler writes "As reported at CNet and the Austin American Statesman, researchers at UT are working with IBM on a new CPU architecture called TRIPS (Tera-op Reliable Intelligently adaptive Processing System). According to IBM, 'at the heart of the TRIPS architecture is a new concept called 'block-oriented execution"' which will result in a processor capable of executing more than 1 trillion operations per second."

Comments

Great....

[innosent]

Great... Just what we need, processors that can perform an instruction, then wait 40000 cycles for the next instruction to be read from memory. I wish we could see some memory improvements to go along with these.

Seriously, though, this will help break all the clustering records, provided we can come up with faster interconnects by then.

Fabrication

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone remember the Pentium Pro? It was an extremely expensive processor. This was because of its strange system of connecting the CPU core with a massive amount of cache ram; production yields were very low, so fabrication costs were very high.

Imagine how high the failure rate would be with fabricating a CPU with four cores... I don't see how it would be practical unless it was with an extremely-high yield design such as the StrongARM.

Oooh, can't wait for the G6!

[Capt'n Hector]

But of course, these processors will require entire software rewrites.

But this reminds me of a growing trend, and that is that as soon as large infrastructures are finally completed (be it the transition to OS X or 802.11b) the technology becomes obsolete. However, the entire infrastructure must be replaced. I don't care how many gazillion flops this or any other processor can pull. They need to easily scale so that the entire infrastructure does not need replacing.