Intel Achieves Single-Processor Teraflop

February 13th, 2007: Intel has finally cracked the ‘Era of Tera’ and introduced the world’s first programmable teraflop processor.

The company says that the new chip delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip not much larger than the size of a finger nail. In addition, the little beast also boasts significant power savings.

Teraflop performance (trillions of calculations per second) has until now only appeared in top-level hardware such as military and research supercomputers where the ability to move terabytes of data is paramount.

Intel says that Tera-scale power will play “a pivotal role in future computers with ubiquitous access to the Internet by powering new applications for education and collaboration.” It claims that artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition seen in science-fiction could become everyday realities.

While it has no plans o bring this specific chip to market, Intel says Tera-scale research is instrumental in investigating new possibilities in 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,” says Justin Rattner, Intel Senior Fellow and chief technology officer. “It points the way to the near future when Teraflops-capable designs will be commonplace and reshape what we can all expect from our computers and the Internet at home and in the office.”

The first time Teraflops 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 186 square metres, was powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed over 500 kilowatts of electricity. Intel’s 80-core research chip achieves this same performance while consuming only 62 watts – less than many single-core processors today.

Technical details of the Teraflops research chip will be presented at the annual Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco.

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