Intel shows off super computer on a chip

Where just a few years ago the processing power that the CPU produces would have required a room full of powerful, noisy computers, the Intel research project reduces it to a sing chip with 80 cores.

The 1 terraflop processor runs at a frequency of 3.13GHz, the same as a standard desktop PC. A teraflop is one trillion mathematical calculations a second, and this is the first time this has been achieved on a single processor. It draws 84 watts of power, again the same as today's standard CPUs.

By producing such a huge amount of power on a single CPU, it will saves data intensive organisations a lot of money, because it needs far less cooling than a super computer, takes far less space and so is much cheaper to run.

The processor can be overclocked, increasing its power to 2 teraflops, running at 6GHz, although at this speed it draws a massive 355 watts of power.

'You can't put a product like this onto the market and expect it to just pick it up,' Nitin Borkar, Senior Engineering Manager at Intel, told AME Info.

'So we're working with software partners and academia to do parallel programming languages and operating systems, so that there are the applications to take advantage of the cores in the future.'

Currently, Intel processes are available on the market with four cores, with eight-core CPUs due for release early next year.

The 80-core processor can be dialled back to work on less cores, at those times drawing less power. It does this when executing less processor intensive computing tasks and the advantage is it then requires less power to run, dropping to 12.4 watts.

The processor is unlikely to be commercially available for seven to 10 years. Initially it is likely to be released as a processor aimed at the business community, typically at organisations then need a lot of computing power to execute tasks, such as crunching financial information to produce market forecasts, for use in healthcare systems such as MRI scanners or for data mining tasks.

Once released, it will quickly find its way into consumer class computers, Bokar added, so will run in the desktop PCs or laptops of the future.

Keep up with all our Gitex coverage