Teraflop chip hints at the future

A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflop) has been unveiled by Intel.
The Teraflop chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm.

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 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.