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Intel Aims For Exaflops Supercomputer By 2018
siliconbits writes "Intel has laid down its roadmap in terms of computing performance for the next seven years in a press release; in addition, it revealed its expectations until 2027 in one deck of slides shown last week. The semiconductor chip maker wants a supercomputer capable of reaching 1000 petaflops (or one exaflops) to be unveiled by the end of 2018 (just in time for the company's 50th anniversary) with four exaflops being the upper end target by the end of the decade. The slide that was shared also shows that Intel wants to smash the zettaflops barrier — that's one million petaflops — sometime before 2030. This, Intel expects, will allow for significant strides in the field of genomics research, as well as much more accurate weather prediction (assuming Skynet or the Matrix hasn't taken over the world)."
At what point does more computing power not matter anymore?
While this sounds impressive, some of us would like to have something on our desktop that is capable of, perhaps, a petaflop or two. Undoubtedly, genomics research would gain massively but there are a lot more reseachers out there, I am sure, whose work would benefit from easier and daily access to such out of the box resources. Getting supercomputing resources to the masses would seem like a worthy goal, rather than just hitting exaflop headlines.
...make accurate weather prediction any less necessary?
Looks like someone is a sore looser.
Just think how much they could make mining Bitcoins on this thing... Oh, actually, hang on...
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Scaled to 10 GHz? (the comments are fun to read)
It's hard to take a claim like that seriously since that famous prediction. Oh well. At least they redeemed themselves with the Core architecture. In my little book anyway.
If my calculations are correct, 1 exaflop with today's best hardware translates to roughly 2000 m^2 worth of CPU area. Reportedly a little less than half an American football field.
Still I'm not sure if it's enough for what I want, namely to create new lifeforms, artificially evolved to say live on a partially terraformed Mars. - That or give teens genetic upgrades for irises which change colour with their mood. The latter of these seems more likely to be met with commercial success.
All rites reversed 2010
In 2007, they were saying intel would have 80-core CPU's in 2011.
It's 2011 now, where can I buy one?
Basically a computer needs to be able to do anything a human can ask of it. Well we can ask an awful lot. I want a computer that can understand natural language and respond in kind. I want a computer that can render 3D graphics that look perfectly real. I want a computer that can accurately model the weather system of the entire planet, and so on.
We are still a long, LONG way from computing power not mattering anymore. Particularly at the high end where this is targeted. While the weather system modeling might be silly for a home user to say, it is something that we'd very much like a computer to do. However right now all the systems are crude models, very much is simplified because there just isn't the power to truly model everything down to, say, the molecular level.
However with enough power, such a thing could be done. How much I don't know, way more than we've got now, but it is perfectly possible.
So we really don't yet know what the upper bounds on what we might want in terms of processing power is. We won't really know until we start reaching it. We'll start having systems and any time we think up something new for them to do, they'll be able to do it with power to spare. Then we'll know "This is it, there really isn't a need for more processing power."
We may well hit physical limits before that though.
When you look at the number of people who still believed in the clock frequency version of Moore's law intel actually got it pretty accurate.
They are only out by a factor of two comparing that to the other numbers 128GHz!!!! Though doubling it again for consumer chips is going to take at least 10 years more.
When they are promising those kind of improvements for 2018 I'll let them be an order of magnitude out.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/nextgeneration-supercomputers/0
It is "one exaflop" and "1000 petaflops". FLOPS still meanst FLoating point Operation(s) Per Second. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS
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"In 2008 James Bamford's The Shadow Factory reported that NSA told the Pentagon it would need an exaflop computer by 2018."
from wikipedia.
"one exaflop" means 10^18 floating point operations, with no time basis.
"1000 petaflops" means 10^18 floating point operations _per second_.
The 's' is not a pluralizing suffix, it's part of the FLOPS acronym. In this usage, it should be "one exaflops", or "one exaFLOPS" to capitalize properly.