Scientists at Intel Corp. have made an experimental microprocessor the size of a fingertip that has the same computational power that it took a 2,500-square-foot supercomputer to deliver just 11 years ago.The new chip could give personal computers extraordinary capabilities that are now available to only a handful of research computers, such as video games that look as realistic as television shows and machines capable of understanding speech.
Intel’s new super-processor takes a radically different approach to boosting performance. It doesn’t mess with the size of the transistor.Instead of thinking of the processor as a single brain, they designed it as 80 computing cores. Each core is like a mini-microprocessor, trained to do a small part of some larger task.
Intel scientists are using special software algorithms to break huge computational problems into many small pieces — and then using the 80 cores to solve these bits of the problem, all at the same time — to achieve the milestone of a trillion calculations per second. This type of divide-and-conquer problem-solving is called parallel processing.