Raytheon has now announced the world’s first polymorph processor and by putting six of these together they’ve created MONARCH (Morphable Networked Micro-Architecture). The new processor has been developed to address large volumes of data with for example sensor systems and at the same time being capable of handling signals and processing data of the same system. The circuit has been developed specifically for the US Department of Defense to minimize the number of different circuits in a system. Depending on what you choose to assign the processor for it will adjust to the task at hand, for example handling signals in the front-end or processing data in the back-end. Except from its flexibility, MONARCH is a wonder of efficiency and according to Raytheon MONARCH squashed Intel’s quad-core Xeon with a factor 10.
MONARCH with its six processors have been measured to achieve 64 Gigaflops, more than 60GB/s memory bandwidth and 43GB/s off-chip bandwidth. The processor was a special project an order from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) and some evaluations still remain to secure the performance and flexibility of the circuit. Hardly something that suitable for our desktop computers, but perhaps a good solution for server systems in the business market.
