60 Watt Teraflops
The processor industry has long been in a race for speed. The price for this speed is paid for in generated heat. These days wattages approaching 200 Watts require huge heatsinks with heatpipes and exotic metals are commonplace in todays PCs. Fox news reports today that Intel has tested at 1.01 teraflops with a CPU chip using only 62 Watts:Intel Corp. (INTC) has designed a computer chip that promises to perform calculations as quickly an entire data center — while consuming as much energy as a light bulb.10 years ago 1 teraflop was accomplished with somewhat less eficiency.The world's biggest chipmaker said Sunday it developed a programmable processor that can perform about a trillion calculations per second, or deliver a performance of 1.01 teraflops.
It accomplishes this feat while consuming 62 watts of power when the chip is running at a frequency of 3.16 gigahertz.
A similarly powerful supercomputer in 1996 at Sandia National Laboratories took up more than 2,000 square feet, used nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed more than 500 kilowatts of electricity.
Tempering the race for speed with power and heat efeciency is a good thing. This is a major accomplishment for Intel
posted by Ray L. @ 9:11 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home