Intel Squeezes 1.8 TFlops Out of One Processor

Jagdeep Poonian writes "It appears as though Intel has been able to squeeze 1.8 TFlops out of one processor and with a power consumption of 62 watts." The AP version of the story is mostly the same; a more technical examination of TeraScale is also available.

The title is misleading

[xoyoboxoyobo]

That's not 62 watts at 1.8 teraflops. That's 62 watts at 3.16 GHz FTFA: "Intel claims that it can scale the voltage and clock speed of the processor to gain even more floating point performance. For example, at 5.1 GHz, the chip reaches 1.63 TFlops (2.61 Tb/s) and at 5.7 GHz the processor hits 1.81 TFlops (2.91 Tb/s). However, power consumption rises quickly as well: Intel measured 175 watts at 5.1 GHz and 265 watts at 5.7 GHz. However, considering the fact that just 202 of these 80-core processors could replicate the floating point performance of today's highest performing supercomputer, those power consumption numbers appear even more convincing: The Department of Energy's BlueGene/L system, rated at a peak performance of 367 TFlops, houses 65,536 dual core processors."

I for one welcome our new Android overlords...

[doomy]

33 of these CPU's should be more than enough to construct Lt. Cmdr Data [wikipedia.org].

Re:Real-time Ray Tracing?

[ispeters]

Secondly, why is the parallelizable nature of ray tracing embarrassing?! It's parallelizable exactly because each ray is computed independently of other rays - I don't see what is embarrassing or surprising about that.

It's embarrassing because "Embarrassingly parallel" [wikipedia.org] is the technical term for problems like ray tracing. It's a parallelizable problem wherein the concurrently-executing threads don't need to communicate with each other in order to complete their tasks so the performance of a parallel solution scales almost perfectly linearly with the number of processors that you throw at the problem.

Ian

Re:What kinds of apps does this make reasonable?

[Heembo]

I used to teach 5th grade computer class, and please do not underestimate the power of Clippy(tm). I would instruct my students to remove Clippy, as I have done per habit for so long, but they would rebel. I recall at least several classes where Clippy hypnotized my class (and kept them preoccupied and easy to deal with.)