turn pc into 600 gigaflop super comp.?

By Leander Kahney | Also by this reporter Page 1 of 2 next »

02:00 AM Oct. 14, 2003 PThttp://www.mail.lycos.com/frameset.nlshtml?session_time=1066437267&goto=jumpPage&.rnd=P8.zHa.gjF4PdlYZ

A small chip-design firm will unveil a new processor Tuesday it says will transform ordinary desktop PCs and laptops into supercomputers.

At the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, California, startup ClearSpeed Technologies will detail its CS301, a new high-performance, low-power floating-point processor.



-point operations per second, or 25 gigaflops.

According to the company, the chip has the potential to bring supercomputer performance to the desktop.

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.

"That's a supercomputer on the desktop," said Simon McIntosh-Smith, ClearSpeed's director of architecture.

The souped-up PC would cost about $25,000, ClearSpeed said. By comparison, most of the supercomputers on the Top 500 list are clusters of hundreds of processors and cost millions of dollars.

The most powerful supercomputer in the world, Japan's Earth Simulator, operates at about 35 teraflops, consumes a warehouse-size space and cost $350 million.

Soon to be in prototype, the chip may be on the market within a year, ClearSpeed said. The company, which is based in Los Gatos, California, and Bristol, United Kingdom, said it will be providing prototypes to computer manufacturers by the end of the year.

When it comes to market, the chip will likely be sold to consumers as a co-processor -- an add-on PCI card that works in parallel with a PC's main processor, just like an add-on graphics card. But instead of boosting graphics performance, the chip will help compute intensive math calculations.

Similar capabilities are already built into Apple's G4 and G5 Macs, which have a floating-point co-processor called AltiVec, which handles complex, data-intensive calculations for the main processor. But whereas AltiVec is four-way parallel, ClearSpeed's chip is 64-way, the company said.

"You might class it as a big evolutionary step of AltiVec," said Mike Calise, ClearSpeed's president.

The second generation of the chip will be 128-way parallel, and then 256, and so on, Calise said.

He said server manufacturers are looking at the chip with a view to building petaflop machines -- monster supercomputers capable of a quadrillion floating-point operations a second -- or the equivalent of 25 Earth Simulators.

A petaflop machine based on the second generation of the ClearSpeed chip would take up about 20 server racks, the company said.

Calise said computer manufacturers are very excited about the new chip.

"Right now it's awe, shock and when can I get my hands on it?" Calise said.

Story continued on Page 2 »


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Boy O' Boy could I use one of those to replace my poor old PIII 450. Has anybody got a spare $25,000 I could borrow?

I'm also wondering, surely they could have come up with the last 4 letters to spell something other then "flop"?

 

That is so much processor It is hard to comprehend on a home pc

 

What would you use all of that speed for?

 

I guess it is like the old saying. I don't care if I need it I just want it!

 

I could go for that!

 

I DONT GET IT FOR A HOME PC THE MOST YOU PROBABLY NEED IS 5 GHZ IF THEY EVER MADE IT

basicly you turn on your pc and your at your desk top

no waiting


this type of thing is more for companys wanting servers on there network with major speed increase but for genral public it 6x over kill

i think it be better for small companys trying to save space for servers with high performance

5 ghz is most you ever need for desktop if they ever made a 64 bit anthlon 5 ghz processor