Posted on Tuesday, September 26 2006 @ 17:11 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
At one of the press briefings at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel discussed the future. This included some talk about Tera-Scale Computing architectures.
The Tera-Scale is a nice architecture name for orientation on mini-cores and mini-threads, which are set to send current dual and quad-core counterparts into the oblivion.
Abel Weinrib stated that parallelism is "inevitable", and the company is now talking about removing obstacles in order to achieve maximum usability and bandwidth. We'll talk more about Tera-Scale architecture in follow-up articles, and just leave you with a picture of the very first mini-core effort from Intel's development team from Far East.
And yes, your eyes aren't fooling you: the ASUS motherboard which Intel's Asian engineers are using is indeed old 430HX Triton chipset based one, equipped with 72-pin EDO SIMMs. The FPGA is using Socket 7 for housing four different PCBs, and everything looks as earliest stages of development.
This FPGA was able to run Windows XP at a clockspeed of only 1.91MHz! (and a processor load of 97%). Check it out
over here.
