Intel today announced that it has produced its first teraflop-on-a-chip. The chip, essentially a prototype, was demonstrated when Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed off the wafer during this week"s IDF conference opening keynote.
Each of the 80 processors on the wafer contain a die with eighty cores -- 6400 cores in total. Each CPU has more than one terabyte per second of throughput between the CPU cores and the on-die SRAM. Otellini claims that this technology will be available within 5 years, putting it in line with the previously outlined Gesher family expected to ship in 2010.
To put that into perspective, the fastest public supercomputer in 1996 was the ASCI Red which featured over 4,500 compute nodes using 200MHz Pentium Pro processors and was the first computer to break the 1 teraflops barrier.
Each of the individual CPUs runs at 3.1GHz in a very simple configuration. These are far from production-ready processors and are mainly for demonstration purposes. Each processor is also unique in the fact that the packaging is three dimensional. The cache substrate is "stacked" directly underneath the FPUs, thus saving space and latency.
The processors are just one component of Intel"s Tera-Scale initiative -- a set of research projects geared to bringing multi-teraflop systems to the masses by 2010. More objectives of this project, including software design, will be announced later during the Intel Developer Forum.
Intel also today announced the official name for its quad-core desktop and server CPU: the Core 2 Quad. As its name implies, the processor contains four cores and features a 1066MHz front-side bus.