Intel plans exascale computing by 2018, wants to make petaflops passé -- Engadget

By Michael Gorman posted Jun 20th 2011 8:13PM

Sure, Fujitsu has a right to be proud of its K supercomputer -- performing over 8 petaflops with just under 70,000 Venus CPUs is nothing to sneeze at. Intel isn't giving up its status as the supercomputing CPU king, however, as it plans to bring exascale computing to the world by the end of this decade. Such a machine could do one million trillion calculations per second, and Intel plans to make it happen with its Many Integrated Core Architecture (MIC). The first CPUs designed with MIC, codenamed Knights Corner, are built on a 22nm process that utilizes the company's 3D Tri-Gate transistors and packs over 50 cores per chip. These CPUs are designed for parallel processing applications, similar to the NVIDIA GPUs that will be used in a DARPA-funded supercomputer we learned about last year. Here we thought the war between these two was over -- looks like a new one's just getting started. PR's after the break.