Every time this happens we get headlines telling us a new era is upon us. And, once again, it is true. Intel has designed a computer chip prototype which can perform more than a trillion calculations per second which is generally called a teraflop. This Intel chip is not much bigger than a fingernail, uses very little power (62 watts) and runs, I will write it again, a teraflop which is a trillion calculations a second.

The Teraflop chip (how I love that name) is air-cooled and contains an internal data packet router in each processor tile. It is able to move data among tiles in as little as 1.25 nanoseconds, making it possible to transfer 80 billion bytes a second among the internal cores. Intel, in the future, should be able to package a memory chip stacked directly on top of the microprocessor. Which will speed up the movement of data between memory and processor by a major amount.

It means that the power of a supercomputer can now be put into a laptop, or a handheld device like a mobile phone. The one above does voice recogntion, sort of. Put that teraflop chip in it and see the difference.

So first, applause for Intel. And a neat quote from Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner at an IT annual meeting in San Francisco, who said, ‘Our researchers have achieved a wonderful and key milestone in terms of being able to drive multi-core and parallel computing performance forward.’

For a comparision think back, if you can, to the Dark Ages of 1996 when a similarly powerful supercomputer at the U.S Sandia National Laboratories, built by Intel, took up more than 180 square meters, used nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed more than 500 kilowatts of electricity. So in ten years that has all been condensed into one chip which is, and this is important, still in the research phase. Still, all praise to Intel for this astounding move forward although we will probably not see it in use for anything from three to eight years.

But, you ask, what is it for? Small increments of speed on a personal computer do not do much for the average user. Word processing runs at the same speed. A spreadsheet still has to be entered. Probably graphics programs making up Internet pages will be a bit faster but not enough to notice.

To see what this chip could do you have to stand outside the current use of computers. With this much power, good speech recognition becomes a reality. I use speech recognition and I have done so for many years starting with when you had to say-one-word-at-a-time very distinctly. Still faster than typing but not by much and prone to make very hilarious mistakes.

Now put the power of this chip behind it and you have seriously good voice recognition. Bill Gates has been banging the drum for handheld devices with speech recognition for a long time. He can always see ahead of the curve. Sometimes too far ahead.

Think of a phone into which you could dictate messages which the phone could instantly transmit. Think of a computer that will only work when it hears your voice, and not the voice of someone else.

With this chip it is possible, practical, will happen.

The same applies to video editing. I can do it now. Slowly and with a lot of swearing and the computer sweats to keep up. Give me that much power and I will make a new version of Gone With the Wind with Welsh sub-titles in a day.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 5:23 am under Science and technology.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
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