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Intel Research advances to Tera-scale
 Intel
researchers have developed the world’s first programmable processor
that delivers supercomputer-like performance. This was achieved with 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 a
result of the company’s innovative ‘Tera-scale computing’
research aimed at delivering Teraflops or trillions of calculations per
second of performance for future PCs and servers.
The Intel India Development Center (IIDC)
played a central role in the development of the Teraflops Research Chip,
contributing about 50 percent of the work, in terms of
the logic, circuit and physical design.
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 specialised 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 Teraflops research chip offered
specific insights in new silicon design methodologies, high-bandwidth
interconnects and energy management approaches.
The first Teraflops performance was achieved
in 1996, on the ASCI Red Supercomputer built by Intel for the Sandia
National Laboratory. That computer took up more than 2,000
square feet, was powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and
consumed over 500 kilowatts of electricity.
Intel’s research chip achieves this level of performance on
a multi-core chip.
The Teraflops chip also features a
mesh-like network-on-a-chip architecture that allows super-high
bandwidth communications between cores and is capable of moving Terabits
of data per second inside the chip. The research also investigated
methods to power cores on and off
independently, so that only the ones needed to complete
a task are used, thus providing greater energy efficiency.
Further Tera-scale research will focus on the addition
of 3D stacked memory to the chip as well as developing
more sophisticated research prototypes with many general-purpose
Intel Architecture-based cores.
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