Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Intel's new chip

Intel last week demonstrated a working processor with 80 individual processing cores. Each core, or "tile" as Intel calls them, consists of a compute element and a router that allows each tile to connect to its neighbor. The chip can deliver more than 1 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), depending on how fast it's running. This is only a research project right now, as there are a lot of challenges involved in making an 80-core chip that's a practical option for PCs and servers. Second picture shows a closer look of the processor chip which is still at research level even though it is demonstrated at media.