Last week Intel announced that it had developed a Terascale Superchip — a supercomputer with 128 cores that’s a bit bigger than a postage stamp. It can perform at a teraflop, or a trillion operations per second, which should be enough power to run Half-Life 3 at 60 fps and full resolution.
What’s truly amazing is that this amount of computing power required a computer that filled a 2,000 square foot room back in 1996. A mere decade later, and the same power comes on a single chip and requires 1/1,000th of the energy.
Intel hopes to have these tiny chips loaded into consumer devices such as cellphones in the next decade, paving the way for applications such as real-time language translation and whatever the porn industry can think up to utilize the new technology.
Technology Review [via MobileMag]
