Entries for February 2007
don't die in the McFlurry
i hide from the cold
the snow outside is so deep
brisk and refreshing
VR Job
So yet again I have started a new job working for Case. I work in the library in the Freedman multimedia Center for our school's current virtual reality expert Jared Bendis.
I can't say too much about what I'm doing other than that it involves a lot of cool game building software and I have access to a fair bit of shiny hardware. I'll be linking as soon I've got something to link to.
Wish me luck (and come visit!).
Welcome to the Land of Teraflops
This morning Intel revealed that they have successfully created a prototype built an 80-core teraflop/second chip. This chip is capable of 1 Trillion floating point operations per second. That's not a typo. And that is preposterously fast.
Let me try to put this into perspective. Everything the computer does is made up of tiny little math problems called operations. A single core is capable of doing only one operation at a time. This is very different from the way people think; humans are capable of generating thoughts that occur at the same time in a sort of constant stream. Computers fool us into thinking they are doing more than one thing at a time (like we do) by switching back and forth between tasks very very quickly. Today's high end CPU's are measured in Giggahertz. GHz are a measure of how many billion operations a chip can do in a second. The fastest single core commercially available CPU's can do about 3.5 - 4 GHz. Intel has a chip on the market called the "Core 2 Duo" that has 2 cores which is actually capable of doing 2 things at once, and another (created by linking 2 quad cores) called the "Core 2 Quad" that can do 4 things at once. If each core is capable of about 3 GHz thats 12 billion operations per second: not too shabby. In fact, "Core 2 Quad"s are pretty much the fastest thing on the market today.
Now let's address this new chip. It has 80 cores all linked together on the same silicon wafer. This means that it can actually do 80 things at once which is a remarkable feat for any computing system let alone a single computer working by itself.
Q: What does it all mean?
A1: One hell of a gaming machine. This thing makes the playstation 3 look like an NES.
A2: This new chip's ability to "think" about so many things at once makes it an ideal candidate for complex tasks such as artificial intelligence.
The best part about the whole deal is that this is only the begining. Berkeley computer scientist David A. Patterson has actually issued a challenge to chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD to produce chips that have THOUSANDS of cores on them. I get excited just thinking about that. So what's the catch? The 80 core chip is only a prototype and we won't see anything like it for about five years.
ONLY 5 YEARS!
