Intel has really turned on to multi-core processor architectures and those who feel that Kentsfield and Clovertown are going to be exciting with its four cores Intel has displayed something even more impressive at IDF. Intel VP Paul Otellini has namely presented Intel’s Tera-scale project which is the first programmable TeraFLOP processor. In other words a processor capable a staggering performance of 1 teraflop. This is possible by housing 80 (!) processor cores clocked at 3.1GHz on a single chip. Otellini presented a silicon wafer with 80 of these processors, all in all 6400 cores on a single wafer.
Intel has developed this processor prototype to investigate different data transfer standards between multiple cores and between cores and the system memory. The goal has been to be able to push out several terabyte data between these elements in a very short time. Something Intel is convinced will be required by the computer systems of the future.
“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.”
Paul Otellini with a silicon wafer filled with Intel’s 80 core processor prototype
Each processor use a sort of sort internal network to tie up the cores and to get extremely fast memory access Intel has integrated a 20MB SRAM circuit directly onto the processor. Byt stacking the memory circuit on the processor it is able to fit thousands of data paths between the cores and memory which has resulted in an internal bandwidth at over 1TB/s. More information about Intel’s Tera-scale computing project can be found at Intel’s website.
