INTEL couldn't be happier. Tera Scale Computing group of projects has received a new member and it's not just another Core 2 CPU. After demonstrating 80-core silicon in Beijing, INTEL's engineers have now updated the cooling component and tweaked the CPU cores in order to obtain
no less than 6.26GHz of pure speed for each core.
As a result the 80-core chip was able to produce a sustained performance index of about 2Tflops @ 6.26GHz. And what's even more interesting about it is that in order to work at its nominal 3.13GHz speed (1Tflop equivalent) the CPU eats up only 24W in full load. Nice, isn't it?
However INTEL's new CPU is not as great as it would seem when regarding the power optimization. While at 3.13GHz it only requires 24W, if you double that speed, a 6.26GHz clocked version eats up about 157W. So they still have some work left with power optimization. Nevertheless an 80-core chip that draws as much power as a 4GHz Core 2 Quad remains impressive.
In idle, only 4 cores are online while the rest are completely offline. As a result at 3.13GHz they consume only 3.32 Watts, meaning that a single unit eats only 0.83W. INTEL's Tera-Scale project currently has two separate components: one related to the development of the 80-core CPU and another responsible with the integration of larger Sram cache onto the future CPUs.
So it's only a matter of time before we will actually see this CPU inside a classic PC case. Maybe it will be sooner than you think. And that could change everything from the performance / die index to the power draw of modern CPUs. One thing's sure though. If this architecture can run X-86 code correctly, it will be the end of modern CPUs. Because there's no comparison between an actual CPU and INTEL's home-grown mutant-CPU.
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