Sugar cube sized supercomputer looms closer to reality
For some years, we've been looking at the progress being made in computing technology and extrapolating that progress. That brought the inevitable prediction from a 'futurologist' towards the end of the Millennium that, 'one day', supercomputing performance would be available from something the size of a sugar cube.
Such claims were taken at the time with a large pinch of salt but it looks like the the day of the sugar cube supercomputer might be closer than we think. The reason? Nvidia has just launched the Tegra X1, a single chip device boasting a computing performance of more than 1Tflop.
That's the same level of performance that was available from ASCI Red, the leading supercomputer in 1998. But while Tegra X1 draws around 10W, ASCI Red needed 500kW for its processing units and a further 500kW for cooling. And while Tegra X1 is the 'size of a fingernail', ASCI Red required 1600sq ft.
