One of these for me please...

[smithy]

OK, first to get their hands on one of these wins a prize:


Boffins create superchip
More powerful than 17,000 quad cores
By Nick Farrell
Thursday, 1 October 2009, 10:24 BOFFINS at the University of Idaho say they have created a single chip more powerful than 17,000 quad core processors that will run on less than 0.03 per cent of the power those chips would require.

The chip will be used on NASA's developing Geostationary Synthetic Thinned Aperture Radiometer (GeoSTAR) project, which will observe hurricanes and other severe storms in the US. It is the latest in a long series of microprocessors created for NASA by the University's Center for Advanced Microelectronics and Biomolecular Research (CAMBR) located in Post Falls.

Sterling Whitaker, who led the team of computer engineers, said that everyone was under pressure against the clock to get the chip made. This was because the team could only use an IBM 90nm fab facility twice in a year.

The chip is responsible for correlating 588 antennas in real-time. This meant that the team had to ensure it fit with the system of electronics featuring many inputs and outputs without crossing any data streams. It also had to run on 120 watts of power.

The system uses a packaging system designed to deliver power throughout the chip via a number of half-spheres spaced evenly across its surface. µ

[Windmiller]

Get's out black ninja suit.......

[wepwawet]

chip die size?
A whole 300 mm wafer? lol

[doccybrown]

Hum, if the Inquirer wouldn`t be
so reliable I would say it`s a hoax
Guess it`s meant the way that there are
17 thousand Quads needed for that special job
(while x86-CPUs are weak on floating point)!
AMDs new Radeon-chip does 2,7 TFLOPS/SP!
Quad-cores= ~ 50 GFLOPS?