Teraflop Madness

My dad once told me that he and his team put a satellite into space using an 8Mhz computer which had 4k of RAM.

Intel today announced a chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflops). The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it.

The first time teraflop performance was achieved was 11 years ago on the ASCI Red Supercomputer built by Intel for the Sandia National Laboratory. That machine took up more than 2,000 square feet, was powered by almost 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed more than 500 kilowatts of electricity.

Intel says that commercial spin-offs of the chip could see it being used in high-definition entertainment PCs, servers and handheld devices.