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Intel Squeezes 1.8 TFlops Out of One Processor

Posted by Hemos on from the that's-a-lotta-juice dept.

Jagdeep Poonian writes "It appears as though Intel has been able to squeeze 1.8 TFlops out of one processor and with a power consumption of 62 watts." The AP version of the story is mostly the same; a more technical examination of TeraScale is also available.

5 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oblig. by niconorsk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's quite fun to consider that when the original joke was made, the processing power of that Beowulf cluster would probably been quite close to the processing power of the processor discussed in the article.

    --
    Nothing is impossible. We just haven't quite worked out how to do it yet.
  2. What kinds of apps does this make reasonable? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does this permit the practical use of any truly breakthrough apps?

    Does it suddenly make previously crappy technologies worthwhile? I.e., does image recognition or untrained speech recognition become a mainstream technology with this new processing power?

    1. Re:What kinds of apps does this make reasonable? by Frumious+Wombat · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Atomistic simulations of biomolecules. Chain a bunch of those together, and you begin to simulate systems on realistic time scales. Higher-resolution weather models, or faster and better processing of seismic data for exploration. Same reason that we perked up when the R8000 came out with its (for the time) aggressive FPU. 125 MFlops/proc@75MHz was nothing to sneeze at 15 years ago. If they can get this chip into production in usable quantities, and if it has the throughput, then they're on to something this time.

      Of course, this could just be a single-chip CM2; blazingly fast but almost impossible to program.

      --
      the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
  3. 99% is exagerated by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The first thing that jumped out at me was the presence of MACs. They are the heart of any DSP. So, this chip is good for computation although not necessarily processing. As other posters have pointed out, this chip could become a very cool GPU. It should also be awesome for encryption and compression. Given that the processor is already an array, it should be a natural for spreadsheets and math programs such as Matlab and Scilab. Having a chip like this in my computer just might obviate the need for a Beowolf cluster. :-)

  4. Real-time Ray Tracing? by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 5, Interesting
    When I read about this I didn't get all worked up, since I imagine that it will be almost impossible for realistic applications to keep all 80 cores busy and get the teraflop benefits. But then I read about the possibility of using this for real-time ray tracing, and got very intrigued!

    Ray tracing is embarassingly parallelizable, and while I'm no expert, two terraflops might just be enough calculating power to do a pretty good job at scene rendering, maybe even in real time. To think this performance would be available from a standard 65nm die that uses 65 watts... that really could make a difference to gamers!