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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.

9 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. The title is misleading by xoyoboxoyobo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

  3. Re:What kinds of apps does this make reasonable? by truthsearch · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does it suddenly make previously crappy technologies worthwhile?

    Vista?

    (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

    --
    Developers: We can use your help.
  4. Re:What kinds of apps does this make reasonable? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Funny

    Clippy?

    "It looks like you're writing a five-page essay on the role of the Judicial branch during periods of famine in the late 1850's."

  5. 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!

    1. Re:Real-time Ray Tracing? by ispeters · · Score: 5, Informative

      Secondly, why is the parallelizable nature of ray tracing embarrassing?! It's parallelizable exactly because each ray is computed independently of other rays - I don't see what is embarrassing or surprising about that.

      It's embarrassing because "Embarrassingly parallel" is the technical term for problems like ray tracing. It's a parallelizable problem wherein the concurrently-executing threads don't need to communicate with each other in order to complete their tasks so the performance of a parallel solution scales almost perfectly linearly with the number of processors that you throw at the problem.

      Ian

  6. I for one welcome our new Android overlords... by doomy · · Score: 5, Informative

    33 of these CPU's should be more than enough to construct Lt. Cmdr Data.

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    ...free your source and the rest would follow...
  7. Re:What kinds of apps does this make reasonable? by Intron · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sorry, your post made me realize that a sophisticated processor is unnecessary. It's already difficult to tell whether a message is from a human or just a randomly generated string of nonsense.

    --
    Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
  8. About time... by nadamucho · · Score: 5, Funny

    Looks like Intel finally put the "80" in 80x86.