Low-power 50 GFLOPS parallel processor from ClearSpeed

[gshv]

FPU acceleretarors are not dead yet... ClearSpeed (http://www.clearspeed.com) is developing a CSX600 parallel processor with 96 ALU/FPU units on a chip. Each ALU/FPU unit runs at 250 MHz, and has it's own 6 KB memory. In addition to that, the CSX600 supports up to 4 GB of external memory. Despite of the big number of ALU/FPU units the processor has very low power consumption - less than 7W, typical power consumption is 5W. The processor will be manufactured in 1011-pin flip-chip BGA package.

Detaled specs of the processor you can find here - http://www.clearspeed.com/downloads/overview_csx600.pdf

Processor performance can be increased by connecting multiple CSX600 processors together. ClearSpeed is planning to sell the add-in PCI-X board with one or two parallel processors on the board. Performance can be increased even further up to 500 GFLOPS by installing up to 5 add-in boards into one PC-compatible (x86) computer. Reportedly, the price of one two-processor board will be about $50,000, or approximtely $500 per GFLOP.

I couldn't find good pictures of the CSX600 processor, the following presentation contains a die picture and an add-in board picture:
http://www.clearspeed.com/downloads/ClearSpeed_FPF_2004.pdf

If ClearSpeed decides to send me a sample of their processor (even non-working) I'd be happy to accept one and I promise I'll post a good quality picture on my site

Genna