SGI to use Intel for 500x supercomputer build by 2018

Intel are dominating the high performance processor industry, and Silicon Graphics International (SGI) have said that they are wanting to build a computer 500 times more powerful than anything today, by 2018.

SGI's chief technology officer Eng Lim Goh said that the company wanted to pair up Intel's many integrated core chips (MIC) with Xeon server CPUs. The MIC technology runs millions of parallel threads by mixing x86 cores with vector processing units.

Eng Lim Goh said that the MIC technology is the way to go because the standard x86 CPU's need a boost. Intel claim that the first MIC product, called ‘Knight's Corner' is going to be produced on 22nm technology and will feature 3D Tri-Gate transistors. A handful of development partners will be getting access to these new chips.

IBM are also joining in the speed race and plan to offer technology which could see speeds boosted to 1000 petaflops, even as soon as 2020. ARM are also keen to tackle this market, but there are no details of their plans. Executives of the company have said in the past that they want to get to ExaFLOP/s ( quintillion operations per second) performance levels by 2020.

Sources have indicated that China's Tianhe-1A, one of the fastest computers in the world, would need 1.6 GW of power to achieve exaFLOP performance levels. Ouch.

Kitguru says: We can't see this ever reaching the home environment, well not unless you have access to Bill Gates chequebook.

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