Having attended the most recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, now I am a full-fledged gadget geek. That said, the Teraflop Chip -- housing 80 separate processing engines -- under development is one amazing chip, just the latest in a series from Intel.
The world's biggest chipmaker has developed a programmable processor that can perform about a trillion calculations per second, and deliver a performance of 1.01 teraflops. Even more impressive, this speedy chip consumes a mere 62 watts of power when it is running at a frequency of 3.16 gigahertz.
A reference point regarding how amazing this feat really is: A little more than a decade ago), a supercomputer that accomplished the same number of calculations at the Sandia National Laboratories was equipped with nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, consumed more than 500 kilowatts of energy and stood at nearly 2,000 square feet.
Right now, the chip remains squarely in the research phase and Intel admits it may never make it to market as it is today, experts say, because there currently isn't an operating system intelligent enough to control it. Still, the Teraflop Chip is an amazing accomplishment and more evidence Moore's Law remains very much alive and well.
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