Intel cranks up 80-core power to 2TFlops - stage almost set alight!
Intel's current quad-core processors provide serious compute power. Way more, we reckon, than most users need. But what if that's just not enough for you?We already know that Intel has a working 80-core 'tiled' processor that can provide a sustained Teraflop (trillions of floating-point operations per second) of performance from a design that, in its latest incarnation, chews through just 45W. Now, to put that into some kind of context, the Teraflop compute barrier was broken in 1996 by an Intel supercomputer that hooked up over 7,000 Pentium Pro CPUs.
Click for larger imageShowing off somewhat, Pat Gelsinger demonstrated the aforementioned processor and egged-on an Intel technician to crank up the compute power to 2TF, with the 80 cores running at around 6.2GHz. The floptastic speed was greeted with much fanfare and smoke (not from the 80-core CPU, I hasten to add).
On a serious note, such parallel compute power in a single package will be invaluable to a number of communities, from raytracing to financial analysis. Kind of makes a quad-core QX6800 seem slow in comparison, but, before you get all excited, the 80-core goliath isn't based on traditional x86 architecture.
This real 'era of tera' will soon be upon us, Gelsinger commented. However, as noted by above, we're some way off seeing it in a desktop environment; the sample shown at IDF2007 is designed for the sole purpose of achieving a particular compute metric.
The parallel nature of the processor and mention of Intel's Larrabee project should raise the eyebrows of various folk connected to the graphics community.
