ClearSpeed Technology has doubled the performance of its high-performance computing co-processor for scientific workstations and server clusters.
It has incorporated 96 separate processing cores on a single chip, the company said at the Fall Processor Forum. The new CSX600 co-processor runs at 250MHz and can achieve 50G Flops (floating point operations per second), a significant improvement over the 200MHz CS301. The older chip produced 25G Flops of performance when added to workstations or servers through a PCI card.
Co-processors are used to relieve the general processors of mathematically intensive tasks that can sap overall system performance. By offloading those tasks to the CSX600, users can run specialised applications on their personal or workgroup machines instead of fighting with colleagues to schedule server or cluster time.