Taking a look into the not-too-distant future, Intel is raising the consumer-processor-bar pretty high with its display of raw 80 core power today. The International Herald Tribune has the scoop:
SAN FRANCISCO: Intel will demonstrate an experimental computer chip Monday with 80 separate processing engines, or cores, that company executives said provided a model for commercial chips that would be used widely in standard desktop, laptop and server computers within five years.
While the chip is not compatible with Intel's current chips, the company said it had already begun design work on a commercial version that would essentially have dozens or even hundreds of Intel-compatible microprocessors laid out in a tiled pattern on a single chip.
Already, computer networking companies and the makers of PC graphics cards are moving to processor designs that have hundreds of computing engines. For example, Cisco Systems now uses a chip called Metro with 192 cores in its high-end network routers. In November, Nvidia introduced its most powerful graphics processor, the GeForce 8800, which has 128 cores.
The Teraflops chip, which consumes just 62 watts at teraflop speeds and is air-cooled, contains an internal data packet router in each processor tile. It can move data between tiles in as little as 1.25 nanoseconds, making it possible to transfer 80 billion bytes a second between the internal cores.
I just want to see how Intel will name the thing. Intel Core 92 Tera?
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