Still talking about Intel Kentsfield, the quad-core chip from Intel...! Think beyond as the Japanese researchers have developed a chip with not 4 but a massive 512 cores.

The Grape DR chip runs at only 500MHz but is capable of performing 512bn floating point operations per second courtesy the 512 cores on the chip.

The chip sits on a PCI-X add-in card and provides back-up for the host system’s CPU.

The 512 cores on the chip are divided into 16 groups of 32 cores each and each group capable of processing a single type of FP instruction. The Chip measures 17 x 17mm, contains 300m transistors, and consumes 60W of power.

Researchers hope that by 2008 they will have a design capable of delivering 2Pflops.

Via: channelregister42540