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Clearspeed Makes Tall Claims for Future Chip
Josuah writes "ClearSpeed Technology announced today a new multithreaded array processor named the CS301. Their press release states the chip can achieve 25Gflops for only 3W of power. New Scientist and TechNewsWorld have articles on this chip, each with more information about the chip. I wondering if this is too good to be true." The key phrase is in the Wired story: "Soon to be in prototype, the chip...". "Soon to be in prototype" is synonymous with "does not exist".
When it comes to market, the chip will likely be sold to consumers as a co-processor -- an add-on PCI card that works in parallel with a PC's main processor
It's not replacing our current processors. It is just helping them with intensive floating-point calculations. Is that really going to be helpful to the average user? Keith
I'm reminded of all the promises we heard for the Transmeta chip, only a fraction of which are being realized. And they have an actual product to demonstrate, mind you.
Yeah, it sounds like wishful thinking. I have little faith in processors from unknown companies that claim to do what Intel, AMD and IBM combined haven't yet been able to achieve.
... best case, and 128 K of cache.
Unless this thing is working on highly specialized data sets, it doesn't matter how much data the core can mow through if it can't get the data fast enough. Why do you think AMD and Intel are so obsessed with their memory interfaces? There's little difference between the Athlon and the Athlon 64 besides large data width and fancy memory / SMP interfaces.
You can make theoritical things on a VHDL simulator that you'll never be able to make into actual silicon. The real magic of companies like Intel, IBM, AMD, etc isn't designing an uber powerful chip, it's designing an uber powerful chip that can actually be realizied in silicon, and at a cost that makes it worth selling.
There has been more than one firm that has suffered from simulator disease. They get all caught up in making an awesome, ass-kicking theoritical design that will eclipse everything and everybody that they forget about physical limits of actual silicon. They then find, when they try to really implement the chip, it just can't be done.
Maybe if we decide to model "Life, the Universe and Everything?"
No, just modelling the surf breaking on a beach would need several beowulf clusters of these chips. Or the flow of gas through an airplane turbine. Or the weather in a small region of planet Earth. There are many simulations of non-linear systems whose simulation require a lot more CPU power than is likely to be available on the near future.
And what about the human brain itself? Our current computers are still so far from the data processing capability in our brains that many people doubt it will be possible at all. Assume we have about 100 billion (10^11) neurons, and each neuron has about a thousand synapses. Assume the simulation of each synapse would need one hundred floating point operations per second. Therefore, to simulate the operation of a typical human brain one would need ten million Gflops, equivalent to a Beowulf cluster of 400000 of these chips. That's what it'll take to do the AI in Duke Nukem Whenever...