New chip gives PCs supercomputing powers

BANGALORE: A computer chip that will enable personal computers to perform some calculations as fast as some supercomputers was unveiled by ClearSpeed Technologies.

ClearSpeed Technologies has developed the CS301 chip,capable of 25 gigaflops - 25 billion "floating point" calculations per second. These arithmetical calculations are also a common measure of computing power.

"With conventional processor design, increasing performance has tended to come with real penalties in power consumption and heat dissipation," said Tom Beese, CEO of ClearSpeed Technology.""The CS301 is designed specifically to meet those needs with high performance, power efficiency and full programmability in C combined into a single chip."

The CS301 is based on a multi-threaded array processing (MTAP) architecture and includes 64 processing elements, 384 Kbytes of on-chip SRAM and I/O ports interconnecting through ClearSpeed's ClearConnect® bus. Each processing element has its own floating point units, local memory and I/O capability, making the CS301 ideally suited for applications which have high processing or bandwidth requirements. The ClearConnect bus is a packet switched network that provides high bandwidth and low power consumption, supporting multiple concurrent transfers giving even higher aggregate bandwidth.

As a result, complex mathematically based applications such as, computational biology and drug discovery, digital content creation, nanotechnology development, scientific research and financial modelling can now be executed in a fraction of the time.