Clearspeed Makes Tall Claims for Future Chip 254
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".
Co processor (Score:1, Insightful)
It's not replacing our current processors. It is just helping them with intensive floating-point calculations. Is that really going to be helpful to the average user? Keith
echoes of Transmeta (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, it sounds like wishful thinking. I have little faith in processors from unknown companies that claim to do what Intel, AMD and IBM combined haven't yet been able to achieve.
25 GFLOPs of performance and 2 x 1.6 GB/sec bus (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless this thing is working on highly specialized data sets, it doesn't matter how much data the core can mow through if it can't get the data fast enough. Why do you think AMD and Intel are so obsessed with their memory interfaces? There's little difference between the Athlon and the Athlon 64 besides large data width and fancy memory / SMP interfaces.
Thing is (Score:3, Insightful)
There has been more than one firm that has suffered from simulator disease. They get all caught up in making an awesome, ass-kicking theoritical design that will eclipse everything and everybody that they forget about physical limits of actual silicon. They then find, when they try to really implement the chip, it just can't be done.
Re:Co processor (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything old is new again... eventually.
From reading the articles, it seems it is indeed designed to be a math coprocessor. Since the Pentium came out, those have been out of style. The Pentium effectively included a 80487 on the same die, and on other architectures that was done even earlier. But now it comes back - only now the idea is a far more powerful coprocessor for scientific functions.
No, it's not going to be very helpful to the average users. But for those of us that spend a lot of time using our computers to do complex mathematical calculations, it could be damn helpful, if it turns out to be anywhere near as powerful as they claim it will be.
Re:I remember the quotes of 256KB of ram and 10MB( (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe if we decide to model "Life, the Universe and Everything?"
No, just modelling the surf breaking on a beach would need several beowulf clusters of these chips. Or the flow of gas through an airplane turbine. Or the weather in a small region of planet Earth. There are many simulations of non-linear systems whose simulation require a lot more CPU power than is likely to be available on the near future.
And what about the human brain itself? Our current computers are still so far from the data processing capability in our brains that many people doubt it will be possible at all. Assume we have about 100 billion (10^11) neurons, and each neuron has about a thousand synapses. Assume the simulation of each synapse would need one hundred floating point operations per second. Therefore, to simulate the operation of a typical human brain one would need ten million Gflops, equivalent to a Beowulf cluster of 400000 of these chips. That's what it'll take to do the AI in Duke Nukem Whenever...