Intel’s annual Research@Intel Day here in Santa Clara kicked off in high gear, with Intel letting out researchers from the lab to see the light of day. Intel has its fair share of „Blue Sky“ projects but probably the most impressive is from its Tera Scale Computing group of projects.
After demonstrating 80-core silicon in Beijing, brave researchers have now polished the cooling component and tweaked the silicon, so now the performance reaches two TeraFLOPS when these 80 floating-point mini-cores are working at no less than 6.26GHz.
The Interesting thing about this demo was the fact that these cores achieve 1TFLOPS at 3.13GHz and at that clock, power consumption is only 24 Watts, while for double more, 6.26GHz eats up more than 157 Watts.
In idle, only four out of 80 cores are working, at 3.13GHz and they consume only 3.32 Watts, meaning that one FP unit eats only 0.83W at 3.13 GHz.
Now, here’s the big kicker for this demo. Currently, this project is actually split in two: one project is currently integrating x86 cores into an massive 80-core monster, while another project is actually stacking of SRAM and DRAM memory on top of this Tera-Scale processing monster. When that happens, cache memory will have bandwidth measured in hundreds of gigabytes per second.
This very impressive stuff has only one real problem when „coming to life“ part is concerned. With X86 cores onboard, this CPU would simply, without any doubt whatever, slaughter the Itanium like there’s no tomorrow.
News Source: The Inquirer