inignoct wrote:
] Rattle wrote:
] ] ] An ordinary desktop PC outfitted with six PCI cards,
] ] ] each containing four of the chips, would perform at
] ] ] about 600 gigaflops (or more than half a teraflop).
] ]
] ] ] At this level of performance, the PC would qualify as one
] ] ] of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.
] ]
] ] ] "At 3 watts, you could put it in a PCMCIA card," said
] ] ] McIntosh-Smith. "With two chips on a PC Card, you can
] ] ] have 50 gigaflops on a laptop, running off a battery.
] ] ] That's equivalent to a small Linux cluster on your
] ] ] notebook."
] ]
] ] Its the FPU from hell!
]
] cool tech. useless for most, but the more computation we can
] get out of a watt, the better, I say.
]
] [one note though -- the wired author said the earth simulator
] was 10 TFlop, but he's off by about 3.5 x. From their
] webpage, the sustained performance of the Earth Simulator is
] 35.86 Tflop, with a peak of 40. Top500 confirms :
] http://www.top500.org/list/2003/06/?page ]

Rooting around on the web, it's not clear how much of their processor has been prototyped in silicon, and to what degree their speed estimates are derived from simulations. They've been working on this or similar technolgy for 15 years or so, first as a graphics processor and then as a network processor for telecom applications.

RE: Wired News: Turn That PC Into a Supercomputer