Intel research chip advances 'era of Tera'

Intel Corporation researchers claim to have developed the world's first
programmable processor that delivers supercomputer like performance from a
single 80-core chip. This chip is not larger than a fingernail and consumes less
electricity than most of our home appliances. This development is the result of
the company's innovative 'Tera-scale computing' research aimed at delivering
Teraflop-trillions of calculations per second-performance for future PCs and
servers.

According to reports Teraflop performance and the ability to move terabytes
of data, will play a pivotal role in future computers by empowering them with
new applications for education and collaboration as well as enabling the rise of
high-definition entertainment on PCs, servers and handheld devices. For example,
artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games,
multi­media data mining and real-time speech recognition, once deemed as science
fiction in Star Trek, have become everyday realities.

80-core teraflops research chip

Intel has no plans to bring this exact chip, designed with floating point
cores, to market. However, the company's Tera-scale research is instrumental in
investigating new innovations in individual or specialized processor or core
functions, the types of chip-to-chip and chip-to-computer interconnects required
to best move data and most importantly, how software will need to be designed to
best leverage multiple processor cores. Teraflop research chip has offered
specific insights in new silicon design methodologies, high-bandwidth
interconnects and energy management approaches.

“Our researchers have achieved a wonderful and key milestone in terms of
being able to drive multi-core and parallel computing performance forward,” said
Justin R Rattner, CTO, Intel. “It points the way to the near future when
Teraflop-capable designs will be common and will reshape what we can all expect
from our computers and the Internet at home and in the office.”

The first time Teraflop performance was achieved in 1996, on the ASCI Red
Supercomputer built by Intel for the Sandia National Laboratory. That computer,
powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium pro processors, took more than 2,000 sq ft
area, and consumed over 500 kilowatts of electricity. And now Intel's research
chip has achieved the same performance on a multi-core chip that can rest on the
tip of a finger.

This 80-core research chip shows Teraflop performance while consuming only 62
watts, less than many single-core processors consume today. The chip features an
innovative tile design in which smaller cores are replicated as 'tiles', making
it easier to design a chip with many cores. Intel's discovery of new and robust
materials to build future transistors lays a path to manu­facture multi-core
processors with billions of transistors more efficiently in future.

The Teraflop chip also features a mesh like 'network-on-a-chip' architecture
allowing super high bandwidth communications between the cores, and is capable
of moving terabits of data per second inside the chip. The research also
investigated methods to power cores on and off independently, so only the ones
needed to complete a task are used, providing more energy efficiency.

Further Tera-scale research will focus on the addition of 3-D stacked memory
to the chip as well as developing more sophisticated research prototypes.