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Intel Squeezes 1.8 TFlops Out of One Processor
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.
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of those!!
The trick like SPEs is finding way to efficiently use them in as many tasks as they can.
I'm glad to see Intel is using their size for more than x86 core production though.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That's not 62 watts at 1.8 teraflops. That's 62 watts at 3.16 GHz FTFA: "Intel claims that it can scale the voltage and clock speed of the processor to gain even more floating point performance. For example, at 5.1 GHz, the chip reaches 1.63 TFlops (2.61 Tb/s) and at 5.7 GHz the processor hits 1.81 TFlops (2.91 Tb/s). However, power consumption rises quickly as well: Intel measured 175 watts at 5.1 GHz and 265 watts at 5.7 GHz. However, considering the fact that just 202 of these 80-core processors could replicate the floating point performance of today's highest performing supercomputer, those power consumption numbers appear even more convincing: The Department of Energy's BlueGene/L system, rated at a peak performance of 367 TFlops, houses 65,536 dual core processors."
"Intel" "Introducing the NEW CORE 80, personal laptop supercomputer running Windows waste my ram and cpu cycles SP2 edition" But seriously this looks interesting for the future. Now we just need software to fully utilize multicore processors.
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?
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. :-)
64 cores should be enough for anybody.
Get the bugs worked out be Xmas and you could sell at 1.81 Tflop easy-bake oven
{...I need more sleep...}
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Gonna get one of these. That should bump up my Vista Experience score.
w00t
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!
I hope they can get them back in.
33 of these CPU's should be more than enough to construct Lt. Cmdr Data.
Since petaflops are likely by the end of the decade its time to imagine exaflops in 2020.
The FSB will be a big bottleneck even more so with the cpu needing to use to get to ram. You would need about 3-4 FSBs with 1-2 mb per core of L2 to make it fast.
Many comments on this post are centered around the processor's use as a personal computing solution. There is much more to computing than PCs! When viewed alongside specialized programming technology, bioinformatics, neurology, and psychology, this (rather large) leap in processing power brings AI to yet another level, and continues the law of accelerated returns. I'm not saying "oh wow now we can have human-like AI", I'm just saying that the ability to process 1.8 Tflops is nothing to scoff. Personal computing is inane and almost moot when compared to the other applications that new processors may pave the way for. Know your facts, but use your imagination.
They've already allocated 40 cores to the RIAA and MPAA for DRM processing, 30 cores to NSA/Homeland Security surveillance of all your computing activities, and 6 cores to combat spam and phishing. In the end, there is no net gain in performance over today's processors. Sorry.
(tongue firmly planted in cheek)
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Looks like Intel finally put the "80" in 80x86.
Sorry, I obviously meant "Base 1010 sucks"...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Are we allowed to imagine a Beowulf cluster of chips that obviate the need for a Beowulf cluster?
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
...is a version of the Sims 2 rewritten so that the Sims have a much greater degree of genuine autonomy, and for said version to be run without human intervention (and recorded) for a period of months or years on a multiple TFlop system. If the environment was made a lot more detailed than it is in the retail version of the game, and if the Sims were given somewhat more capacity for learning than what they've currently got, something tells me the results of such an experiment might be extremely interesting, given enough time.
Or more like the T9s... So the 32way crossbar switch, with 32 processors that I have working in the garage is coming back into fashion... Now if all the work that we did on interconnect topologies and their performance in networks up to size 1024 nodes might be useful. Hey we might even make something from the book!.... Welcome back to the late '80s Intel - do yourselves a favour - read the literatature - we've done the painful stuff already - you don't need to waste money on the fundemental research - its been done!