How about a home computer that worked like hundreds, possibly even a thousand computers networked together? Your very own super-computer.
Intel says that could be only five years away. The company has demonstrated a prototype chip with 80 separate processing engines, or cores, that may lead to the development of similar chips for mainstream computers.
"During a briefing last week, Nitin Borkar, one of the chip's designers, showed an air-cooled computer based on the chip running a simple scientific calculation at speeds above 1 trillion mathematical calculations a second.
"Such computing power matches the performance speed of the world's fastest supercomputer of just a decade ago. However, Intel acknowledged that the experimental chip was not a complete system necessary to do real computing work."
"'If we can figure out how to program thousands of cores on a chip, the future looks rosy,' said David Patterson, a University of California, Berkeley, computer scientist who is a co-author of one of the standard textbooks on microprocessor design. 'If we can't figure it out, then things look dark.'"
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