Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

According to John Markoff of The New York Times, today Intel will be demonstrating an experimental computer chip with 80 separate cores. This is going on at the Solid States Circuits Conferences in San Francisco today, and it’s stirring quite the buzz.  Before you get all excited, this is just a prototype, and currently it’s not compatible with the most recent Intel processors.  It can’t interact to external memory yet, but the plans are in the works to develop a commercial version.

The commercial version as expected, would be used in your desktops, laptops, servers, etc. Unfortunately, it will be at least five years before consumers will be able to get their hands on one. With 80 separate cores, what would you do with all that processing power? The possibilities would be endless, developers would have a lot of room to groove, and computer games would become more and more realistic.

It’s amazing to think that the Dual Core processors are just starting to get around, and yet the Teraflop chip is already in the works. And according to Gizmodo, at 1 trillion calculations per second, the 80-core chip would be able to do the same amount of calculations as 2,000 square feet of machinery could do 10 years ago.

One question that needs to be asked is whether or not increasing the cores will increase the performance. Markoff says, “In a white paper published last December, the scientists said that without a software breakthrough to take advantage of hundreds of cores, the industry, which is now pursuing a more incremental approach of increasing the number of cores on a computer chip, is likely to hit a wall of diminishing returns — where adding more cores does not offer a significant increase in performance.”

This chip would be air-cooled, and definitely raises the bar for the industry. While an 80 core processor may seem like a lot, with the way ‘some’ of the current operating systems are going, it wouldn’t be. The processors tend to evolve right along side the operating systems, and as more processing power becomes available, bloated operating systems take full advantage of the resources.

Source: The New York Times

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Okay, so we might be chasing the flying unicorn of modern technology here — and, no, we’re not talking about the white iPhone 4 — but as you’ve probably noticed, our hunger for a quantum computer is basically insatiable. Lucky for us, some folks who actually know something about producing qubits are similarly persistent — a team of researchers recently presented a scalable quantum chip at a meeting of the American Physical Society in good old Texas. The 6 x 6-cm processor sports four qubits, the basic units of quantum computing, and its creators say it has the potential to be scaled up to support 10 of the things within the year. So what does that mean for our quest for the ultimate super computer? Well, it means we’re closer than we used to be… and the dream lives on.

Researchers show off scalable architecture for quantum computing, expand our minds originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Mar 2011 21:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The race for ever-tinier computer chips is on, and barring physical limitations, doesn’t seem to be slowing anytime soon — but with chips, as with humans, the smaller they get, the more fragile they become. A team of researchers called CRISP (Cutting edge Reconfigurable ICs for Stream Processing) is working to create a self-repairing multi-core processor that would allow on-chip components to keep on shrinking, while combating concerns over accelerated degradation. Basically, the team’s conceptualized a chip that allows for 100 percent functionality, even with faulty components. With multiple cores sharing tasks, and a run-time resource manager doling out those tasks, the chip can continue to degrade without ever compromising its intended functions — a process CRISP calls graceful degradation. Once one core fails, the on-chip manager assigns its task to another core, continuing on in this fashion for the complete lifetime of the chip. Of course the technology is still in its infancy, but if CRISP’s chips comes to fruition, we could see virtually indestructible processors that make 14nm look bulky by comparison.

Researchers tout self-repairing multi-core processors originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iFixit may have physically uncovered Apple’s latest silicon, but it’s the processor gurus that have discovered what’s truly inside — using software benchmarks, they’ve unearthed the speeds and feeds of the Apple A5. As you’ll no doubt be aware having read our headline above, there actually isn’t a 1GHz CPU at the helm, as AnandTech and IOSnoops report the dual-core ARM chip is dynamically clocked around 900MHz, likely in search of reduced power consumption. Perhaps more interestingly for all you gamers in the audience, the iPad 2 reports that it has a dual-core PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU on the die as originally foretold — and, spoiler alert — it mops the floor with both the original iPad and the Motorola Xoom. Though the new chip didn’t quite demonstrate 9X the graphical prowess of its predecessor, it rendered 57.6 frames per second in a GLBenchmark test where the (admittedly higher-res) Tegra 2 tablet managed only 26.7fps, and last year’s iPad pulled only 17.6fps. That’s some serious Tai Chi. Hit up our source links to see the difference it can make in games like Infinity Blade.

Update: Though it sure sounds like there’s a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 in there, that’s not yet a proven fact — we only know that it’s a dual-core ARM v7 chip which performs relatively similarly in non-graphical tests. [Thanks, Jim]

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

iPad 2 specs discerned, 900MHz dual-core ARM CPU and PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU blow away graphical benchmarks originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Mar 2011 20:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Following close behind the low-power Nano X2 comes the Eden X2, or what VIA is calling “the world’s most power-efficient” fanless dual-core processor. While we’ve yet to see any official numbers, the original Eden did 500MHz on one watt of power, so we should see similarly thrifty specs here. Aside from that, the unit houses two 64-bit cores in a 21 x 21 millimeter package, is compatible with Windows CE and Linux operating systems, and was built using a 40-nanometer manufacturing process. The Eden X2 made its debut at the World Embedded conference this week, and should make it to the real world by the end of Q2. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading VIA says Eden X2 is world’s most power-efficient dual-core processor

VIA says Eden X2 is world’s most power-efficient dual-core processor originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 02:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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