Parallel Lines

In 1996 Intel built its first supercomputer capable of teraflops performance. It was called ASCI Red and was built for the Sandia National Laboratory.

It took up more than 2,000 square feet, was powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed over 500kW of power.

Just over 10 years on and Intel says it has achieved the equivalent performance from a single multi-core chip.

But is this parallel computing gone crazy or a taster for what will really be needed to power the server farms which run the Internet a decade from now?

Intel has no plans to bring this chip, designed with no fewer than 80 floating point cores, to market. But the lessons learnt in designing its on-chip interconnect architecture and power management algorithms will be used in generations of multi-core processors to come.

The real message should be energy-efficiency. Teraflops performance may boggle the mind but the microprocessor industry has more practical considerations theses days. Maybe it feels it can save the planet with sustainable designs. And that is what multi-cores are all about.

According to Intel, the 80-core research chip consumes only 62W, which is about what a Xeon processor running at 2.4GHz consumes.

But AMD has been quicker to press the power efficiency button. Last week v-p Randy Allen challenged the industry to step-up efforts to increase energy efficiency in order to reduce energy consumption.

He was responding to a study, funded by AMD, which found that US data centres consumed five million kW of energy, the equivalent of five 1,000 MW power plants "I believe these findings are a wake-up call not just for the IT industry, but also for global business, government and policy leaders," said Allen.

The subtext to this message is "go multi-core my son"