Consumer access to a supercomputer has just taken another big step forward. For those of you who have been following the AMD - Intel “wars” for the past few months, the latest ‘processing’ developments may not come as big surprises, but to the average consumer, the thought of 2 or 4 or even 8 cores running inside their PC is nothing short of a technological marvel. Intel, however, has announced that they have the capability to put an astounding 80 individual processors on one silicon chip.
Last week, Intel announced that they successfully tested a prototype research chip in Santa Clara. Called the Teraflop Chip for it’s ability to do trillions of calculations (also known as Teraflops) per second, this chip performed around 1.01 trillion calculations a second while only being powered with a voltage of 62 watts; barely more than 1.5x the consumption of a 40 watt bulb. OK, so that was the obvious part, but the capabilities of that kind of chip is staggering. I can’t imagine THEORETICALLY being able to burn 50 DVDs at one time without experiencing any slowdown…but it isn’t like I participate in that sort of thing.
When the human brain sees numbers like “billion” and “trillion” it’s hard to process, so here’s an example from my computer: I’m running an Intel P4 2.6Ghz Northwood chip, an average, run-of-the-mill piece of hardware. This chip probably operates at somewhere over 10 billion calculations a second; which let’s me burn a full CD (full speed burning) in about 3-4 minutes. OK, now imagine a chip running 100 times faster than that. Now you can see where I’m going.
While Intel says that the 80-core prototype is just a prototype, don’t be surprised to see a chip that boasts the speed and capabilities of 64 of those single P4 jobs in one to two years. I’m not sure if anyone will have the purchasing power to run down and grab one off the shelf, but this kind of advancement is fantastic to us consumers. Investment along multi-core lines will only help to scoot along the rollout of computers that have the ability to truly do dozens of things at once, and whether you’re a gamer, a musician, an artist, or a businessman, that is great news.
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Go Billy Go!!!!
But the problem with CD writing is your hardware can’t handle that..
Indeed, probably no-one’s can, however, it is theoretically possible to achieve that kind of output. And, to be fair, the article itself involves a bit of theory-in-practice anyways. -Billy
Nice I see you deleted my last post. Too personal? Just admit your article is flawed, I’m not the only one that is saying it. Cd writing speeds have NOTHING to do with processing power, unless your running a
I admitted to the previous commenter that there is a certain amount of theory in the article and made an edit to reflect that position, and will admit I probably should have focused on another area of processing, such as AI and high-end physical calculations.
However, since you have not contributed in a positive manner with either of your two posts to the repair of article-in-question, any future comments pointing out the error will be moderated as I have acknowledged the assumption of incorrect data and no more discussion on the matter needs to occur. If you would like to continue the discussion, feel free to email the admin at admin@gopaultech.com. -Billy