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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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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!
33 of these CPU's should be more than enough to construct Lt. Cmdr Data.
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)
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Looks like Intel finally put the "80" in 80x86.