Carrie
11-13-2003, 08:53 PM
Source:C NET (http://news.com.com/2100-1006-5107396.html?tag=cd_top)
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Start-up ClearSpeed Technology hopes to turbocharge supercomputers and servers with a new chip designed to absorb a lot of the excess math.
The company's CS301 processor, which will be demonstrated publicly for the first time at the SC2003supercomputing conference in Phoenix next week, is a low-power, multiple-core chip built to handle the complex, but repetitive, math calculations involved in data compression, protein matching or film rendering. These tasks can bog down even the most powerful computers.
Although the chip only runs at 200MHz, it contains 64 separate "processor elements" that can simultaneously work on parallel instructions, or different, but structurally similar, math problems. In terms of raw calculating power, that gives the CS301 a top performance of 25 gigaflops, or 25 billion operations per second. That's about twice as many as a 3GHz Pentium 4. The gigaflops measure doesn't give an exact indication of performance, but it gives some insight into how quickly a chip or computer can complete certain tasks.
Read More Here (http://news.com.com/2100-1006-5107396.html?tag=cd_top)
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Start-up ClearSpeed Technology hopes to turbocharge supercomputers and servers with a new chip designed to absorb a lot of the excess math.
The company's CS301 processor, which will be demonstrated publicly for the first time at the SC2003supercomputing conference in Phoenix next week, is a low-power, multiple-core chip built to handle the complex, but repetitive, math calculations involved in data compression, protein matching or film rendering. These tasks can bog down even the most powerful computers.
Although the chip only runs at 200MHz, it contains 64 separate "processor elements" that can simultaneously work on parallel instructions, or different, but structurally similar, math problems. In terms of raw calculating power, that gives the CS301 a top performance of 25 gigaflops, or 25 billion operations per second. That's about twice as many as a 3GHz Pentium 4. The gigaflops measure doesn't give an exact indication of performance, but it gives some insight into how quickly a chip or computer can complete certain tasks.
Read More Here (http://news.com.com/2100-1006-5107396.html?tag=cd_top)