Teraflops Research Chip

Advancing Multi-Core Technology into the Tera-scale Era
The Teraflops Research Chip is the latest development from the Intel® Tera-scale Computing Research Program. This chip is Intel's first silicon tera-scale research prototype. It is the first programmable chip to deliver more than one trillion floating point operations per second (1 Teraflops) of performance while consuming very little power. This research project focuses on exploring new, energy-efficient designs for future multi-core chips, as well as approaches to interconnect and core-to-core communications. The research chip implements 80 simple cores, each containing two programmable floating point engines—the most ever to be integrated on a single chip. Floating point engines are used for accurate calculations, such as for graphics as well as financial and scientific modeling. In terms of circuit design, they are more complex than integer engines, which just process instructions.