Faster chip hits the desktop
Published: 15 Oct 2003 10:20 BST
A Silicon Valley firm has discussed a processor that can be used in desktop PCs that is faster than anything currently available from major chip makers.
Chip-design firm ClearSpeed Technology announced its ClearSpeed CS301, a processor that it claims can achieve a 25 Gigaflop peak performance, or 25 billion floating point operations a second, according to statement from ClearSpeed.
Standard desktop processors from Intel, AMD, Apple and others typically perform at several million flops, while supercomputers containing groups of processors generally start at 1 teraflop (one trillion flops).
"The CS301 is the first in a family of ClearSpeed microprocessors that we believe will challenge present day thinking by creating a world where scientists, bio-informaticians, engineers and content creators alike can have access to high performance computing anywhere, anytime," Tom Beese, chief executive of ClearSpeed Technology said in the statement.
The CS301 is multi-threaded and includes 64-way parallel processing. The unit can serve as a co-processor alongside an Intel or AMD CPU within a workstation, when fitted on an expansion card.
It can also be used in a blade server or cluster, or as a standalone processor for embedded DSP (digital signal processing) applications like radar pulse compression or image processing, said the statement.
"In applications where the CS301 is acting as a co-processor, dynamic libraries offload an application's inner loops to the CS301… By offloading the inner loops, the CS301 can bypass the traditional bottleneck caused by a CPU's limited mathematical capability, executing the core of the application more than twice as fast as anything else in the marketplace," said the statement.
The efficient use of power and its ability to run cool will allow it to be installed on PC Cards, giving notebooks workstation-like abilities, according to other reports.
New Scientist reports that a single chip will cost around $16,500 (£9,898) and a PC-compatible version will become available later this year. The CS301 chip will be announced at the Microprocessor Forum 2003, taking place in California this week.
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