The Hindu : National : The onset of the tera era

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Tuesday, Feb 13, 2007
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National

National

The onset of the tera era

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore: The shift within the last year from two processing cores on a single computer chip to quad or four cores on a chip might seem significant. But as Americans say: "You ain't seen nothing yet!" At the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2007) in San Francisco (U.S.) on Monday, Intel researchers announced that they succeeded in putting 80 cores on a thumbnail-sized slab of silicon.

With this research chip, the team was able to achieve a teraflop of performance — that is, a computer built around the processor crunched numbers (or floating point operations) a trillion times a second. A decade ago, the world's first teraflop supercomputer achieved a similar speed — but it took a huge machine with 10,000 Pentium chips to achieve this.

Energy consumed

In the process, it gobbled up 500 kilowatts of energy. According to the paper read out by the Intel team, their single-chip solution consumed just 60 watts — about the same as an average light bulb.

The breakthrough would suggest that the Tera Era is already here — when a single chip can perform the supercomputing tasks hitherto done by a room full of computers working in tandem.

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