Dewd! More Computer Power Than You Can Imagine!
“A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflop) has been unveiled by Intel. The Teraflop chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm. The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it. The challenge is to find a way to program the many cores simultaneously. Current desktop machines have up to four separate cores, while the Cell processor inside the PlayStation 3 has eight. Each core is effectively a programmable chip in its own right. But to take advantage of the extra processing power, programmers need to gives instructions to each core that work in parallel with one another.”
Teraflop chip hints at the future
A teraflop on one chip… NOW we’re talkin’! I want one in my laptop! I like the photo they show that the new chip has the same power on the size of a fingernail that used to take and entire, huge computer room full of mainframe systems!