Intel experimental prototype and plans for teraflop programmable processors

Intel Corp. Tuesday (Sept. 26) revealed the first details of its terascale research silicon program, including the development of the world’s first programmable processor said to deliver 1 trillion floating point operations per second (Tflops/s).

Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.) also tipped an SRAM and a silicon laser chip, as part of its ongoing research into terascale technology. One of the first prototypes chips in Intel’s program is the Tflops/s processor. Containing 80 simple cores and operating at 3.1 GHz, the goal of this experimental chip is to test interconnect strategies for moving terabytes of data from core to core and between cores and memory, according to Intel.

Unlike existing chip designs where hundreds of millions of transistors are arranged, this chip’s design consists of 80 tiles laid out in an 8- by 10-block array, according to Intel.

“When combined with our recent breakthroughs in silicon photonics, these experimental chips address the three major requirements for terascale computing — Tflops/s of performance, terabytes-per-second of memory bandwidth, and terabits-per-second of I/O capacity,” Rattner said in a statement. “While any commercial application of these technologies is years away, it is an exciting first step in bringing tera-scale performance to PCs and servers.”

From CNET, Intel pledges 80 cores in five years for commercial chips