Full information can be found here: http://www.intel.com/research/platform/ter...homepage+80core

But basically it is a new processor thing that intel is working on, where there are tons of cores that are all linked together. And I beleive it says that they are smaller than a fingernail for a 1 teraflop.

It is interestign when you look at the table for speeds on the website. How they show that running at 3.16Ghz...the processor that they tested used only 62 watts of power and yet it had a performance of over 1 Teraflop.

Hopefully they'll be getting these things out soon. Because it sounds so interesting how they have it so that they can easily be repeated over and over again, meaning a virtually limitless way to do this without having to redisgn the processor to meet the needs of different devices such as servers, handheld devices, and computers.

Anybody else heard anything about this? Or what does everybody think?

I don't really think the market is ready for a teraflop processor. Then again, maybe in a year or two, my post is invalid.

xboxrulz

I agree with xbox, we dont need that speed yet! what we have now suits everyone fine! there is no amount of programs and OS's that you can run that would need that type of speed. Maybe in a few years, we may be wanting them for servers and such, but at the moment - they can stay in development!
-jimmy

Yes, but if you look at the information. It looks like they are scalable...meaning that it doesn't have to be a teraflop processor...that is just what their development version was. (with 80 cores) They could instead drop that down to a number that is needed, as the technology allows them to do that depending on the needs.

Also, wouldn't it be nice for the speed of the computer to be no obstacle in anything that is done?

Yeah i agree too, we've just seen quad cores come out. But intel will probably take it's time to perfect this new cpu which is good. Later on when applications start to get more advanced with people discovering new features that are possible a high performing cpu is a really good choice.
Considering they can get 1 teraflop with only a small ammount of power that is great, people wouldn't need to go and get massive power supplys just for their cpu.
I think we could expect to see these in the next 1 or 2 years to come.

-HellFire

Hey! I'm happy with my old pure Intel P Celeron 1Ghz, it works good for web development (with 390MB RAM). But for some projects I will need more than 1 teraflop! really, I need a little google server at home to look at my girlfriend's archives!!!
Anyway, technology grows faster than people's budget.
I'll be happy with a decent computer with enough power to run Beryl and increase my productivity. But I will have to take care on my code, ANYTHING MAY RUN FASTER IN A NEW PROCESSOR(except Window$), but BABY!! you are not the only one that will use the software. Sometimes I think that Game testers also test Micro$oft programs... (another history).
Talking about the multi-core technology, is another buzzword, like grid-processing. Intel can't avoid physic laws.
Another related topic is: http://www.geek.com/bio-computing/

Blessings!

This post has been edited by develCuy: Jun 24 2007, 02:52 AM

this is really a great news, I hope this new processor is for the desktop.

We've seen how the processor clock speeds have peaked up in the past decade. So there is no wonder of this new teraflop processor.

even the gaming consoles like PS3 have teraflop processors, so we should be expecting them soon on the desktop PCs too

Yeah, really great news, even though I don't really need that kind of speed yet, but the only thing I want, that a cpu would be fast, would use low power and the main thing, would be very silent, I mean wouldn't need a cooler, thats why I like some CPU's usually PPC which doesn't use a lot of power and doesn't need a cooler, but those kind of CPU's usually are 400-800Mhz, enough speed for me to run Linux though or to use it as a powerful router, which could be controlled by a connected PC so it could share Internet, also it could be used as apache/php/mysql etc. server and for file storage and many more, but as the CPU isn't very fast, it is better to use it for a small network or just for yourself

Well, I suppose that depends on which market we're talking about, really.

For example, being somewhat involved with the digital animation industry, I know for a fact that this new processing technique will be a god-send. They currently employ what's called Render Farms, which are basically large collections of connected computers among which the processing workload is distributed. This market alone is growing very rapidly and is demanding enough to justify this new processing method.

Of course, numerous other fields can benefit from such processing power. Research institutions, large Web server with turnkey services, government networks, scientific exploration projects, etc., etc.

Shifting to the mass-consumer market, i.e. the common end-user like us, I agree that there is no foreseeable way for this kind of processors to be used. As has been mentioned already, quad core processors are not in use even though they already are in the market. This is largely due to the fact that it's technically close to impossible for current Operating Systems to parallelize among the four cores. I've seen many people using dual core processors, namely Intel's Core Duo processor, and complaining that they're not seeing much difference from older Pentium IV processors with Hyper-Threading. I admit I haven't been closely following the processor-manufacturing industry lately, so this bit is almost solely based on casual observation.

Bottom line is: no matter what they come up with, a use will be found for it not so much later. Anyway, it's rather refreshing that, for once, hardware is running faster than software requirements