Loko’s Domain You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Note: I wrote this a few years ago. I’ve been neglecting my blog, so I’ll post some reading material new to this place.

Taken from Intel’s website. It’s a short read and you can skim for important facts, but you won’t find much information that isn’t already here. If you’re skimming, of course.

A little over ten years ago, ASCI Red (a collaboration between Intel and Sandia Labs, as part of the U.S. Government’s Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative) was the world’s first TeraOps supercomputer in 1996.

Though, the machine was decommisioned in 2006. Some fun facts in regards to this beast:

· Mesh-based (38x32x2) MIMD (Multiple Instruction stream, Multiple Data stream) massively-parallel processing machine.

· Originally consisted of:

-4,510 compute nodes
-1,212 GB of memory
-12.5 TB disk space

· Originally used nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro CPUs, each clocked at 200 MHz.

· Later upgraded to 9,298 Pentium II OverDrive CPUs, each clocked at 333 MHz.

· Consisted of 104 cabinets, taking up almost 2,500 square feet.

· First computer on Earth to rate above 1 TeraFLOPS.

· After being upgraded with Pentium II Overdrive processors, it benchmarked above 2 TeraFLOPS.

· Consumed 500kW of power and another 500kW to cool the room.

Now, for the Intel TeraFLOPS Research Chip:

· Achieves 1 TeraFLOPS on one wafer.

· One die with 80 simple cores.

· Only consumes a mere 62W of power.

· Tested frequencies of 3.16GHz to 5.7GHz.

· Higher frequency achieves a TeraFLOP rating of 1.81, but still only needed an additional 200W of power.

How awesome is that? I mean “awesome” in the original sense of the word, not the much abused position the word finds itself in many conversations that teens use today regarding the latest popular band or a non-epic movie.

Well, moving forward. That is going from using nearly 10,000 Pentium IIs to only one chip that goes well beyond the performance from today’s higher end quad-core dies in a little over 10 years.

So, those of you who have purchased higher end quad-core processors this year should not frown; you have a very sexy processor that is available to the general public. Also, the fact that this chip will not be used for general purposes such as gaming … obviously. Nonetheless, it’s still nice to think about where technology might be in another five years.

I can’t wait for my Intel® Extreme Edition Octo-Phantom 2.86 GHz. (Note: Not a real processor. New Note: I should have said dodeca-core.)