Jack Clark from ZDNet reports that many-core processors, power-saving chips and advanced memory technologies will all come into play if Intel is to reach its goal of developing an exascale computer by 2018.
The challenge here is generating that much computing power within a modest 20 megawatt-power budget. Today a petaflop[-scale] computer is burning something between five and seven megawatts,” said Intel CTO Justin Rattner. “If we scaled that up it’d [consume power] in the gigawatt range and I’d need to buy everyone a nuclear reactor.”
At the Intel Developer Forum this week, Rattner also demonstrated the Hybrid Memory Cube, a low-latency Nand flash memory device using a four-high stack of DRAM chips with a logic die sitting underneath it. Rattner demonstrated how the device could feed information to the processor at a rate of 1TBps.
