Intel Announces Jaw-Dropping 50 Cores and One Teraflop Performance on Single Chip

Intel turned some heads at a recent conference on supercomputing in Seattle when it announced Knights Corner, a single chip capable of one teraflop performance and uses 50 separate cores to pull it off. Intel claims that this new chip will deliver faster, more accurate results when performing calculations.

Instead of a standalone processor, Knights Corner apparently works along side a computer’s CPU with a mix of standard x86 and specialized cores. Though Intel didn’t say exactly how many cores were packed into the chip, the Seattle Times indicates that the number is in excess of 50. The chip uses the PCI express slot and is part of a larger Intel effort to increase overall computing performance while simultaneously lowering energy consumption.

Though where Knights Corner is going to show up next isn’t entirely certain, it will have one immediate task: Helping to power a new supercomputer. Called Stampede, it’s set to debut in 2013 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center housed, conveniently, at the University of Texas. It’ll be capable of running at a not-too-shabby 10 petaflops, or 10 trillion floating point operations per second, with the Knights Corner contributing about 80% of the processing power.

(Seattle Times, PC World)

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