Intel to showcase 80 core research chip at Gitex

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Intel CorporationIntel Corporation

"Today consumers use microprocessors with two and four cores, however in the coming years, the numbers of cores on a microprocessor will continue to grow, launching an era of vastly more powerful computers, as demonstrated by the 'Teraflop Research Chip'", stated Khaled El-Amrawi, Intel General Manager, Egypt Levant and North Africa. "With Intel's continued discovery of new and robust materials to build future transistors, and no immediate end in sight for Moore's Law, this lays a path to manufacture multi-core processors with billions of transistors more efficiently in the future. The 'Teraflop Research Chip' is an amazing achievement for Intel and we are very excited about showcasing it the Middle East for the first time."

The 'Teraflop research chip' is the result of the company's innovative "Tera-scale computing" research aimed at delivering Teraflops -- or trillions of calculations per second --performance for future PCs and servers. Tera-scale performance, and the ability to move terabytes of data, will play a pivotal role in future computers with ubiquitous access to the Internet by powering new applications for education and collaboration, as well as enabling the rise of high-definition entertainment on PCs, servers and handheld devices. For example, artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition once deemed as science fiction in "Star Trek" shows could become everyday realities.

"Our researchers have achieved a wonderful and key milestone in terms of being able to drive multi-core and parallel computing performance forward," said Nitin Borkar, manager of the Prototype Technology team in the Microprocessor Technology Labs at Intel. "It points the way to the near future when Teraflops-capable designs will be commonplace and reshape what we can all expect from our computers and the Internet at home and in the office."

Also remarkable is that this 80-core research chip achieves a teraflops of performance while consuming only 62 watts - less than many single-core processors today.

The chip features an innovative tile design in which smaller cores are replicated as "tiles," making it easier to design a chip with many cores. With Intel's discovery of new and robust materials to build future transistors and no immediate end in sight for Moore's Law, this lays a path to manufacture multi-core processors with billions of transistors more efficiently in the future.

The Teraflops chip also features a mesh-like "network-on-a-chip" architecture that allows super-high bandwidth communications between the cores and is capable of moving Terabits of data per second inside the chip. The research also investigated methods to power cores on and off independently, so only the ones needed to complete a task are used, thus providing more energy efficiency.

as well as developing more sophisticated research prototypes with many general-purpose Intel® Architecture-based cores. Today, the Intel® Tera-scale Computing Research Program has more than 100 projects underway that explore other architectural, software and system design challenges.

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© Press Release 2008