Intel Develops Tera-Scale Research Chips

Intel Develops Tera-Scale Research Chips

Intel Corporation today described the significant technical challenges that need to be addressed if computing, from personal devices to giant data centers, is to keep up with increasing demand by consumers and businesses for Internet-based software, services and media-rich experiences.

In a speech today at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel Senior Fellow and Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said that during the next decade online software services, hosted by mega data centers with more than a million servers, will allow people to access personal data, media and applications from any high-performance device to play photo-realistic games, share real-time video and do multimedia data mining. This new usage model will challenge the industry to deliver the one trillion floating-point operations-per-second (teraFLOPs) of performance and terabytes of bandwidth.

“The rise of mega data centers and the need for high-performance personal devices will require the industry to innovate at every level, from many-core processors to higher-speed communications between systems, while delivering better security and energy efficiency,” said Rattner. “Solving these challenges will bring benefits to all computing devices while creating new markets and opportunities for developers and systems designers.”

Tera-Scale Research Prototype Chips: Rattner outlined the importance of three major silicon breakthroughs. He started by revealing the first details of Intel’s tera-scale research prototype silicon, the world’s first programmable TeraFLOP processor. Containing 80 simple cores and operating at 3.1 GHz, the goal of this experimental chip is to test interconnect strategies for rapidly moving terabytes of data from core to core and between cores and memory.

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