Now Intel says that it can put the processing power of ASCI Red in the palm of your hand. Literally.
Intel does this with a new chip, code-named Knights Corner. Knights Corner crams more than 50 general-purpose Pentium microprocessor cores onto a single chip. All by itself, Knights Corner can perform about 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second. In 1996, it took 72 cabinets of servers for ASCI Red to pull off the same feat.
That’s not bad for a chip that just a few years ago seemed to be a failure. Knights Corner was built from the ashes of Intel’s failed graphical processing unit (GPU), called Larrabee.
Larrabee didn’t work out, and rival Nvidia reigns supreme in the GPU market. But Intel hopes to give Nvidia a run for its money in high-performance computing, a place where Nvidia has been making inroads with its Tesla processors.
The Tesla chips can do a lot of calculations without burning up too much power, and in the past few years that’s won them some fans in the supercomputing set.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/11/supercomputer-han/