The device is powered by 1.6GHz custom AMD eight-core CPU with x86 architecture, 1.84
teraflop GPU based on AMD's Radeon technology and 8GB GDDR5 memory.
The '
Teraflop Research Chip' is able to deliver more than one trillion mathematical calculations per second (1
Teraflop) of performance, and is not much larger than the size of a finger nail, whilst additionally using less electricity than most of today's home appliances, said a statement.
Today, IBM dominates the field with supercomputers that achieve giga-and
teraflop rates of speed inside massive parallel-processing hardware.
For the first time since the Top 500 List - www.top500.org - was issued in 1993, all 500 computers listed could handle a
teraflop, or a trillion calculations per second.
The Blue Gene system to be installed in Lausanne will have a peak processing speed of at least 22.8 trillion floating-point operations per second, or 22.8
teraflops. Five years ago, no computer in the world was capable of more than one
teraflop.
Nasa says it wasn't even using all 20 clusters when it set the 42.7
teraflop world-record speed.
When completed, the NSF-funded cluster will have a peak speed of 3
Teraflops (one
Teraflop is 1012 floating point operations every second).
Linux NetworX, Salt Lake City, Utah, has delivered an Evolocity II (E2) Linux cluster to Argonne National Laboratory that is capable of performing more than one trillion calculations per second (1
teraFLOP).
A
teraflop is expressed as one trillion floating-point calculations per second.
TERAFLOP CLUB - FLOP is Floating Point Operation, a computer graphic term.