Following its move from standard processors to dual-core and quad-core designs in 2006, Intel researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs trillions of floating point operations per second while using less electricity than a modern desktop PC chip.
First described by Intel executives at a September trade show, the chip fits 80 cores onto a fingernail-size chip and draws only 62 watts of power, which is lower than many modern desktop chips.
The company has no plans to bring this "teraflops research chip" to market, but is using it to test new technologies such as high-bandwidth interconnects, energy-management techniques, and a tile design method to build multicore chips, said Jerry Bautista, director of Intel's tera-scale research program. He spoke in a conference call with reporters on Friday before presenting technical details of the research at the ISSCC (Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference) trade show in San Francisco.
Intel engineers are also using the chip to explore new forms of tera-scale computing, in which future users could process terabytes of data on their desktops to perform real-time speech recognition, multimedia data mining, photo-realistic gaming and artificial intelligence.
