To highlight its leading position in CPU development, Intel demonstrated a prototype 80-core PC, codenamed Polaris, capable of two teraflops of computing capacity. Intel CTO Justin Rattner and senior vice president Pat Gelsinger jointly presided over the opening of the forum at the Beijing IDF.
Polaris is being developed under the Tera-Scale Computing Research Program initiated by Intel in early 2006, aimed at pushing computing performance into the tera-scale.
The Polaris prototype PC was manufactured by Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) who joined the research program a year ago.
In addition to the Polaris, Intel's new Nehalem processors, which are slated to be launch in 2008, will come with eight cores, according to Rattner, who also stated that by 2010, Intel will be able to boost the CPU performance per watt by 300% from the levels in 2006.
Intel's forthcoming 45nm Core 2 Duo Penryn CPUs will clock at core speeds above 3GHz with 6MB L2 memory, while the quad-core parts will have 12MB L2 memory, according to Gelsinger.
Additionally, Rattner said that Intel's shipments of Core 2 Extreme quad-core processors will reach the one million mark by the first half of 2007 and that shipments of 65nm CPUs are expected to top 112 million units by the second quarter, accounting for 94% of Intel's total CPU shipments.
The 80-core Polaris prototype PC
Photo: David Tzeng, DigiTimes, April 2007
Article translated by Steve Shen and edited by Ricky Morris
