Jason Dunn
02-12-2007, 07:29 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/02/12/tech-chip.html' target='_blank'>http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/02/12/tech-chip.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Intel Corp. has designed a computer chip that promises to perform calculations as quickly as an entire data centre — while consuming as much energy as a light bulb. The world's biggest chipmaker said Sunday it developed a programmable processor that can perform about a trillion calculations per second, or deliver a performance of 1.01 teraflops. It accomplishes this feat while consuming 62 watts of power when the chip is running at a frequency of 3.16 gigahertz. A close-up view of an Intel 80-Core Teraflops Research Chip wafer. (Intel) A similarly powerful supercomputer in 1996 at Sandia National Laboratories took up more than 2,000 square feet, used nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed more than 500 kilowatts of electricity."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/IntelChipWafer.jpg" /><br /><br />This chip is in still in the R&D phase, but it sound extremely promising, even if only some of the breakthroughs they've achieved make their way into consumer-level CPUs. CPUs might have caught up with the basic tasks like email and Web access, but until I can encode video at 10x to 20x real-time, I don't think I'll feel like CPUs are quite fast enough. ;-)