December 14, 2007
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 10 -- Intel Corporation on Dec. 16 celebrates the 60th anniversary of the transistor, the building block of today's digital world. Invented by Bell Labs and considered one of the most important inventions of the 20th century, transistors are found in many consumer electronics and are the fundamental component used to build computer chips, or the "brains" of the personal computer (PC).
Intel, the world's largest manufacturer of computer chips, has recently introduced its 45 nanometer (nm) next-generation family of quad-core processors. Called the biggest transistor advancement in 40 years by Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore, the processors are the first to use Intel's Hafnium-based high-k metal gate (Hi-k) formula for the hundreds of millions of transistors inside these processors. Introduced on Nov. 12 and continuing into the next few months, this latest innovation is enabling servers, everyday PCs and laptops to become smaller, faster, sleeker and more energy-efficient while also eliminating eco-unfriendly lead and, in 2008, halogen materials.
Guided by Moore's Law
On April 19, 1965, Electronics Magazine published a paper by Moore in which he made a prediction about the semiconductor industry that has become the stuff of legend. Known as Moore's Law, his prediction states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every 2 years, enabling widespread proliferation of technology worldwide, and today it has become shorthand for rapid technological change.
Moore's Law not only predicts that computing technology will increase in value but at the same time would actually decrease in cost. The price of a transistor in Intel's newest chip family is about 1 millionth the average price of a transistor in 1968. If car prices had fallen at the same rate, a new car today would cost about one cent.
With its transistors turning on and off more than a trillion times per second, the Intel Core Duo processor can complete close to a billion calculations in the blink of an eye or finish 4 million calculations in the time it takes a speeding bullet to travel one inch.(1) And the average power of an Intel Core Duo processor is less than 1.1 watts, which is significantly less than many familiar household appliances, such as a 100W light bulb.(2)
Smaller and faster chips made possible by Intel's technology advancements benefit consumers lives by enabling improved performance, longer battery life, and sleeker, quieter and more energy-efficient PCs and laptops. If engineers continue Moore's Law and succeed in continuing to reduce the size of the transistor while increasing the speed, the world could expect amazing new innovations and applications such as real-time language translation and facial recognition, as well as enabling cars that take verbal commands to a destination.
For more information, visit the press kit at www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/events/60th_anniversary.
About Intel
Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom and blogs.intel.com.
(1) The average time it takes for a complete human blink is ~300 to 400 msec
(2) http://www.solarsense.com/Spec_Your_System/Calculators.html
-----
Source: Intel Corp.
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...
Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
Read more...
Supercomputing veteran, Bo Ewald, has been neck-deep in bleeding edge system development since his twelve-year stint at Cray Research back in the mid-1980s, which was followed by his tenure at large organizations like SGI and startups, including Scale Eight Corporation and Linux Networx. He has put his weight behind quantum company....
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...
May 09, 2013 |
The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
Read more...
May 08, 2013 |
For engineers looking to leverage high-performance computing, the accessibility of a cloud-based approach is a powerful draw, but there are costs that may not be readily apparent.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.