Clearspeed Makes Tall Claims for Future Chip

Josuah writes "ClearSpeed Technology announced today a new multithreaded array processor named the CS301. Their press release states the chip can achieve 25Gflops for only 3W of power. New Scientist and TechNewsWorld have articles on this chip, each with more information about the chip. I wondering if this is too good to be true." The key phrase is in the Wired story: "Soon to be in prototype, the chip...". "Soon to be in prototype" is synonymous with "does not exist".

"Soon to be in prototype"

[psyconaut]

Chips are virtually fabricated and tested well before the first bit of silicon is etched....you can actually be pretty sure of both a chips performance and reliability just from simulations these days. Also, having to etch development chips constantly is both expensive and time consuming....so the longer you can leave a design in virtual space, the better.

-psy

Um, guys? It's 25GFLOPS, not 25GHZ!

[Moekandu]

The chip will have 64 parallel FPU's. If it can complete one floating point operation per cycle, it will only need to run at about 350 to 400Mhz to reach 25GFLOPS (latency and pipeline issues aside, of course). Even if it requires 2 clock cycles, or the first 32 FPU's feed the second, we're talking about 700 to 800Mhz.

I'm not certain, but I thought I ran across similar number crunching capabilities in Integer OPS. It seems to me to have been in regards to fibre fabric and switching.

Or I could be on crack.

Hm.

Moekandu

Re:Good points ! Link for you.

[zymano]

Here's the link.

graphics cards as general processors [gpgpu.org]

Not a lot of RTFA happening...

[TexVex]

So I'll summarize some interesting key points:

1. The chip is fully programmable and an SDK invluding C compiler is available now.
2. The chip will be marketed as a coprocessor.
3. They expect to start selling them for around $16,000 in a few months.