Why Stop at 80 Cores When You Can Have 512?

Back in September, we reported on the news that Intel had created an 80 Core processor. Something that they took great pleasure in showing off at this years IDF Conference. Well now the Japanese have gone one better with the all new Grape DR chip, running with no less than 512 Cores - providing 512billion floating point calculations per second.

The Grape DR is actually a co-processor, designed to run on a PCI Extended (PCI-X) board, and provides additional processing for the main systems processor. Each Core engineered to handle a single mathematical instruction.

The chip measures a substantial 17×17mm, holding 300m transistors and is said to consume up to 60watts of power.

Designers of the Grape DR, the University of Tokyo, have been working on the 512 core processor for the last 2 years. By 2008 they aim to have a chip capable of two(2) quadrillion floating-point operations per second. (2Pflops).

More information: The University of Tokyo - The Grape DR Project [en]