Intel Shrinks Supercomputer Into the Palm of Your Hand

Intel's Technical Computing Group chief Raj Hazra holds a 1 teraflop Knights Corner chip.

Back in the late 1990s, Justin Rattner got a special sense of satisfaction every time he drove by a nondescript Intel building in Beaverton, Oregon. Inside, researchers from Intel and Sandia National Labs were assembling the ASCI Red supercomputer, the first computer capable of doing one trillion calculations per second.

That’s not bad for a chip that just a few years ago seemed to be a failure. Knights Corner was built from the ashes of Intel’s failed graphical processing unit (GPU), called Larrabee.

Nvidia has been making inroads with its Tesla processors.

When it goes online in January 2013, Stampede will have 10,000 times the processing power of ASCI Red


“It’s a reminder of how fast this industry moves,” he says. “I spent a lot of my life with a lot of my co-workers designing ASCI Red … to think that I can hold that in my hand now, it’s humbling.”.