I read on Gizmodo about an article on the Technology Review, about Intel's new 128 core terascale superchip. The superchip is just a little bit larger than the size of a postage stamp, yet has the ability to perform a teraflop, which is a trillion operations per second, or as gizmodo puts it, the ability to play Halflife 3 at 60fps and full resolution. The processing power of this chip equals that of what was produced by a computer the size of a 2000 square foot room in 1996. Wow!
The article states that while processor manufacturers have been aware for a long time of the speed benefits of multi-core processors, they have been unwilling to make them due to the major overhaul of software programming that would be required. Programs would need to be written so that their processes could be divided efficiently and effectively among the various cores, called parallel programming, to avoid situations like bottlenecking; when one process finishes early but has to wait for other processes to catch up before it can move on.
Chip manufacturers have been able to avoid the change for a long time, by their ability to continually increase the speed of the single core processor. Recently, however, the manufacturers came to an impasse, when the single core processors simply required too much power than was feasible to be able to improve on their speed any further.
The thing is, once programming techniques evolve to be able to handle the new situation, and these chips are able to be installed in everyday devices like mobile phones, the sky's the limit with new product functionality. One idea I was particularly taken by was the real time translation of phone calls. We're really heading towards star trek now, when everyone walks around with a communicator device attached to their shirt (or where ever works for you), that translates speech from all languages right to you. Forget the need to actually study languages anymore, sounds amazing.
One thing though, I just don't wanna see any of those artificial intelligence nuts anywhere near one of these chips. The movies and books show that it just wouldn't be worth it.
Can anyone think of any other uses for this much processing power in a small device?
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