The following appeared in the UK edition of "Electronics Times":

ClearSpeed shows chip that can
upgrade PC to supercomputer

by
david.mannersİrbi.co.uk

Bristol-based parallel processing firm ClearSpeed Technology showed off its first chip this week that it claims can upgrade a PC to a supercomputer."It's the first chip which can give iTflops in a PC," Tom Beese, ClearSpeed CEO, said. "It's an accelerator sitting alongside a
Pentium or an Athlon and you off-load to it the compute-intensive inner loops which can take up to 90 per cent of the time used by the Pentium or Athlon."

At Supercomputing 2003 in Phoenix, the chip ran protein docking code and fast Fourier transforms.Beese, explaining the need for ClearSpeed's chip, said: "The US Department of Energy has mapped out the processing needs of the biotech industry, and simple tasks in biotech require iTflops of performance but there are less than 70 systems worldwide that can deliver that, so there's a whole industry which can't access the processing power it needs."
Each chip implements 64 processing elements which collectively deliver 25Gflops so you need 40 chips for a teraflops capability. The chip runs at 200MHz and dissipates 3W. IBM is manufacturing it on a 0.13µm process. Samples will be available this quarter and are priced at $975 in volume.

"It's very power-efficient," said Beese. "You should be able to install it in existing systems without the need for cooling."

As well as delivering the teraflops PC, the chip is seen as a potential building block for the petaflops (one thousand trillion flops) server, which could be implemented using 20 server racks.ClearSpeed's plans envisage a 256 processing element chip as the next step. "We've built a platform of technology from which we can deliver a roadmap," said Beese.
ClearSpeed evolved from Pixelfusion which aimed to apply parallel processing to 3D graphics.
Anybody got $975 to spend?