AMD Responds to Intel with its Own Teraflop Concept
Last month at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Intel showed off a kind of "concept CPU," the way automobile manufacturers at the Auto Show in Detroit parade their concept vehicles. Intel's model was observed to have performed at a throughput rate of one teraflop - one trillion calculations per second. Never to be left outdone for long, AMD answered back yesterday at a press event in San Francisco, with a system design that, while not a single CPU, makes the case for "teraflop on a budget." Rather than pile 80 cores onto a single chip, as Intel's design accomplishes, AMD's teraflop system is comprised of a pair of dual-core Opteron processors coupled with a pair of R600 Stream processors. If you're wondering why you haven't heard of AMD R600 processors, it's because you still might have some information to absorb on account of the ATI acquisition. R600 processors are essentially GPUs, but in this design, they're being co-opted for general-purpose processing.
More information can be found in the AMD press release HERE
. - Nemo *News Editor *