Intel Outs New Single Chip Capable Of Teraflop Performance

I've been piddling with tech since I was in grade school. Thinking back to that old Tandy computer I had as a kid and comparing it to the 6-core beast we have on desktops today it's amazing how tech has changed over the decades. I often wonder what sort of tech my kids will be toting around 20 years from now. Intel has a new chip that hits at what the future will be like.

The latest chip from Intel is a 1-teraflop beast that has over 50-cores. Intel is testing the processor inside a computer at the SC11 supercomputer conference in Seattle. The little chip that is pushing out so much performance is the size of a matchbook and called Knights Ferry. The architecture of the chip is called many integrated core or MIC.

To put a bit of perspective on the teraflop number, that means that the chip is capable of a trillion floating-point operations per second. The photo above is of a slide from the presentation that sums things up nicely. The Knights Bridge chip needs a single PCIe slot to hit 1TF. Back in 1997 to hit 1TF performance took 9,298 Pentium II Xeon processors and 72 cabinets. How's that for progress?

[via Seattle Times]