Intel gives details of Tera-Scale chip at forum

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 27 September 2006 18:30

Your IT - Home IT

Rattner demonstrated a third major innovation, the recently announced Hybrid Silicon Laser chip developed in collaboration with researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara. With this breakthrough, dozens or maybe hundreds of Hybrid Silicon Lasers could be integrated with other silicon photonic components onto a single silicon chip. This could lead to a terabit-per-second optical link capable of speeding terabytes of data between chips inside computers, between PCs, and between servers inside data centres.

• Announcements

Rattner said that during the next decade online software services, hosted by mega data centres with more than a million servers, will allow people to access personal data, media and applications from any high-performance device to play photo-realistic games, share real-time video and do multimedia data mining. This new usage model will challenge the industry to deliver the one trillion floating-point operations-per-second (teraFLOPs) of performance and terabytes of bandwidth.

“The rise of mega data centres and the need for high-performance personal devices will require the industry to innovate at every level, from many-core processors to higher-speed communications between systems, while delivering better security and energy efficiency,” said Rattner. “Solving these challenges will bring benefits to all computing devices while creating new markets and opportunities for developers and systems designers.”