• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.

Intel Research Chip Advances 'Era Of Tera'

Jimmy 2004

New Member
Joined
Jan 15, 2005
Messages
5,458 (0.78/day)
Location
England
System Name Jimmy 2004's PC
Processor S754 AMD Athlon64 3200+ @ 2640MHz
Motherboard ASUS K8N
Cooling AC Freezer 64 Pro + Zalman VF1000 + 5x120mm Antec TriCool Case Fans
Memory 1GB Kingston PC3200 (2x512MB)
Video Card(s) Saphire 256MB X800 GTO @ 450MHz/560MHz (Core/Memory)
Storage 500GB Western Digital SATA II + 80GB Maxtor DiamondMax SATA
Display(s) Digimate 17" TFT (1280x1024)
Case Antec P182
Audio Device(s) Audigy 4 + Creative Inspire T7900 7.1 Speakers
Power Supply Corsair HX520W
Software Windows XP Home
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 11, 2007 - Intel Corporation researchers have developed the world's first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip not much larger than the size of a finger nail while using less electricity than most of today's home appliances. This is the result of the company's innovative 'Tera-scale computing' research aimed at delivering Teraflop -- or trillions of calculations per second --performance for future PCs and servers. Technical details of the Teraflop research chip will be presented at the annual Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco.

Tera-scale performance, and the ability to move terabytes of data, will play a pivotal role in future computers with ubiquitous access to the Internet by powering new applications for education and collaboration, as well as enabling the rise of high-definition entertainment on PCs, servers and handheld devices. For example, artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition - once deemed as science fiction in Star Trek shows - could become everyday realities.

Intel has no plans to bring this exact chip designed with floating point cores to market. However, the company's Tera-scale research is instrumental in investigating new innovations in individual or specialized processor or core functions, the types of chip-to-chip and chip-to-computer interconnects required to best move data and most importantly, how software will need to be designed to best leverage multiple processor cores. This Teraflop research chip offered specific insights in new silicon design methodologies, high-bandwidth interconnects and energy management approaches.

"Our researchers have achieved a wonderful and key milestone in terms of being able to drive multi-core and parallel computing performance forward," said Justin R. Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer. "It points the way to the near future when Teraflop-capable designs will be commonplace and will reshape what we can all expect from our computers and the Internet at home and in the office."

The first time Teraflop performance was achieved was in 1996, on the ASCI Red Supercomputer built by Intel for the Sandia National Laboratory. That computer took up more than 2000 square feet, was powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed over 500 kilowatts of electricity. Intel's research chip achieves this same performance on a multi-core chip that could rest on the tip of a finger.

Also remarkable is that this 80-core research chip achieves a teraflop of performance while consuming only 62 watts - less than many single-core processors today.

The chip features an innovative tile design in which smaller cores are replicated as "tiles," making it easier to design a chip with many cores. With Intel's discovery of new and robust materials to build future transistors and no immediate end in sight for Moore's Law, this lays a path to manufacture multi-core processors with billions of transistors more efficiently in the future.

The Teraflop chip also features a mesh-like "network-on-a-chip" architecture allowing super high bandwidth communications between the cores, and capable of moving Terabits of data per second inside the chip. The research also investigated methods to power cores on and off independently, so only the ones needed to complete a task are used, providing more energy efficiency.

Further Tera-scale research will focus on the addition of 3-D stacked memory to the chip as well as developing more sophisticated research prototypes with many general-purpose Intel Architecture-based cores. Today, the Intel Tera-scale Computing Research Program has over 100 projects underway that explore other architectural, software and system design challenges.

Intel is presenting eight other papers at ISSCC, including one which will cover the Intel CoreTM micro-architecture and its use in dual and quad core processors spanning laptops to desktop PCs and servers, using both 65nm and revolutionary 45nm process technologies. Other papers cover such topics as a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) reader transceiver chip, a low power cache for mobile applications, a reconfigurable Viterbi accelerator, as well as novel circuits for on-die supply resonance suppression, on-chip phase-noise measurement and adaptive techniques for variations and aging.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site
 

Alec§taar

New Member
Joined
May 15, 2006
Messages
4,677 (0.71/day)
Location
Someone who's going to find NewTekie1 and teach hi
Processor DualCore AMD Athlon 64x2 4800+ (o/c 2801mhz STABLE (Ketxxx, POGE, Tatty One, ME))
Motherboard ASUS A8N-SLI Premium (PCIe x16, x4, x1)
Cooling PhaseChange Coolermaster CM754/939 (fan/heatsink), Thermalright heatspreaders + fan built on (RAM)
Memory 512mb PC-3200 DDR400 (set DDR-33 for o/c) by Corsair (matched pair, 2x256mb) 200.1/200mhz
Video Card(s) BFG GeForce 7900 GTX OC 512mb GDDR3 ram (o/c manually to 686 core/865 memory) - PhaseChange cooled
Storage Dual "Raptor X" 16mb 10krpm/RAID 0 Promise EX8350 x4 PCIe 128mb & Intel IO chip/CENATEK RocketDrive
Display(s) SONY 19" Trinitron MultiScan 400ps 1600x1200 75hz refresh 32-bit color
Case Antec Super-LanBoy (aluminum baby-tower w/ lower front & upper rear cooling exhaust fans)
Audio Device(s) RealTek AC97 onboard mobo stereo sound (Altec Lansing ACS-45 speakers - 10 yrs. still running!)
Power Supply Antec 500w ATX 2.0 "SmartPower" powersupply
Software Windows Server 2003 SP #1 fully patched, & massively tuned/tweaked to-the-max (plus latest drivers)
Well, "here today? OUT OF DATE, LATER TODAY..."

:)

* The "motto of this field"... lol!

(I always felt that patent safes from R&D developments have @ least a 5-10 yr. jump on what things CAN be like, & this is just a look @ that line of thinking!).

Still - not to be a pessimist, but this is NEAT to know, that such power is possible, today, if it were needed, & not in a machine that's the size of your home, as the article tigger69 put out, had put it.

APK

P.S.=> It's part of why I quit buying every-to-every-other year for computer equipment really... that kind of successive buying only keeps you buying, & getting MAYBE 20-30% boosts! I've noted I get around 50% ones IF I held off to buying absolutely NEW/state-of-the-art, every 4-5 years or so. Sometimes, I'll upgrade a vidcard, if the power boost is 'huge' (like 50%, & lately, w/ NVidia @ least (who I pay attention to), it has been that way) but, the prices are usurious/outrageous too... here, I tend to be "a generation behind" until prices drop to where I can handle buying w/ out nuking the bank! apk
 
Joined
Dec 1, 2006
Messages
132 (0.02/day)
Location
New York, NY
I buy latest equpiment every 5 years as well. If you're lucky you can double your speed at the rate computing upgrades are coming. Soon phase change won't be so exotic and my next pc probably won't have a single fan in it including the PSU.
 

Completely Bonkers

New Member
Joined
Feb 6, 2007
Messages
2,576 (0.41/day)
Processor Mysterious Engineering Prototype
Motherboard Intel 865
Cooling Custom block made in workshop
Memory Corsair XMS 2GB
Video Card(s) FireGL X3-256
Display(s) 1600x1200 SyncMaster x 2 = 3200x1200
Software Windows 2003
I like it. I like it.

So is this the direction of intel chipset GPU? Just need to bump up precision from single to double and you've got a 67W GPU >> nVidia 8800 in SLI.

Poor Ageia and their PhysX project. Unless they are able to adapt their APIs to work with a revised Ageia PCI/PCIe card that has this little monster sitting on it. Nice. I want one.

________________________

P.S. This is a specialist processor and is not intended to be a "CPU" replcement in the way we understand it on a PC. It's a special purpose device. It can execute hundreds (actually 80) asynchronous calculations as opposed to current parallel vector processors than can handle hundreds of identical computations.

It's an ideal starting point for an ALU (math coprocessor or physics system), or GPU
 
Last edited:

FLY3R

New Member
Joined
Feb 24, 2006
Messages
395 (0.06/day)
Processor AMD 3700+ SD Core @ 2.8gHz
Motherboard DFI LanParty nf4 Expert
Cooling Zalman
Memory G.Skill Extreme Series (2x 1GB) PC4000
Video Card(s) Evga 7800GT
Storage 80GB Seagate
Display(s) ViewSonic 20.1" Widescreen 16:9
Case CoolerMaster Centron
Audio Device(s) Audigy 2 ZS Gamer
Power Supply SeaSonic 600w SLI
Software XP pro (sp2)
Damn.:eek:

Is the beginning of the end.:confused:
 
Joined
Oct 1, 2006
Messages
4,884 (0.76/day)
Location
Hong Kong
Processor Core i7-12700k
Motherboard Z690 Aero G D4
Cooling Custom loop water, 3x 420 Rad
Video Card(s) RX 7900 XTX Phantom Gaming
Storage Plextor M10P 2TB
Display(s) InnoCN 27M2V
Case Thermaltake Level 20 XT
Audio Device(s) Soundblaster AE-5 Plus
Power Supply FSP Aurum PT 1200W
Software Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

Namslas90

New Member
Joined
Aug 27, 2006
Messages
4,846 (0.75/day)
Location
Earth
Sounds interesting, I wonder what it'll cost. AMD seems to be focusing more on the commercial applications of performance increase; and leaving the Home PC advancement up to Intel. I've been waiting for the new AMD line, but I don't think I want to run a Server, just to get a 4X4. So far, that seems to be all they have. It would be nice to find a L1 mobo with 2X Pci-e 16X, but so far no luck. Now I'm looking at Intel Q. The other problem is that AMD bought ATI and there are no real advancements in ATI chipset mobos for the 4X4 AMD.
 

Easy Rhino

Linux Advocate
Staff member
Joined
Nov 13, 2006
Messages
15,444 (2.43/day)
Location
Mid-Atlantic
System Name Desktop
Processor i5 13600KF
Motherboard AsRock B760M Steel Legend Wifi
Cooling Noctua NH-U9S
Memory 4x 16 Gb Gskill S5 DDR5 @6000
Video Card(s) Gigabyte Gaming OC 6750 XT 12GB
Storage WD_BLACK 4TB SN850x
Display(s) Gigabye M32U
Case Corsair Carbide 400C
Audio Device(s) On Board
Power Supply EVGA Supernova 650 P2
Mouse MX Master 3s
Keyboard Logitech G915 Wireless Clicky
Software The Matrix
but will it let me play crysis??? :nutkick:
 

Scavar

New Member
Joined
Aug 29, 2006
Messages
573 (0.09/day)
Location
Ft Lauderdale, FL
System Name ScarredWolf(Desktop), MBlackWolf(Laptop)
Processor E6600(Desktop), T7300(Laptop)
Motherboard EVGA 680i(Desktop), IFL90(Laptop)
Cooling Akasa EVO 120(Desktop), No idea(Laptop)
Memory G Skill PI 8GB 4x2gb(Desktop), G Skill 3GB 1GB/2GB(Laptop)
Video Card(s) 8800GTS 640mb(Desktop), 8600m GT(Laptop)
Storage 3x250GB 1x500GB(Desktop), 1x320GB(Laptop)
Display(s) Acer AL2216W 22"(Desktop), 15.4"(Laptop)
Case Cosmos 1000(Desktop), PowerPro J 10:15(Laptop)
Audio Device(s) CreativeX-Fi/Z-5500(Desktop), Realtek/No idea(Laptop)
Power Supply PC Power and Cooling Silencer 610w(Desptop), *shrug*(Laptop)
Software Windows Vista Ultimatex64 with tweaks(Both)
Benchmark Scores I'm too lazy to benchmark anything.
If we steal it, can we take over the world?
 
Top