Robin van Spaandonk wrote: >>Somewhat off topic, but see: >> >>http://www.intel.com/research/platform/terascale/teraflops.htm?iid=newstab+supercomputing >> >I wonder what they charge for it?
It is NFS (Not For Sale). It is just a prototype device. It does not do any useful computation, but it does useless work at record-breaking speed. (Which, come to think of it, is how you might describe Windows.) This one was designed to test the new "mesh" interconnections between the cores. This interconnection scheme can be scale up to thousands of cores, apparently. They are still working on the memory, which is some secret new configuration. See: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37572 They figure it will be available in a practical version in about 5 years. Japanese researchers last year demonstrated a 512-core math coprocessor that may achieve 2-PFlops next year. See: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/11/06/japan_512-core_co-pro/ - Jed
