Mighty Morphing Power Processors

[honorarybrutha]

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_23/b3936081_mz018.htm

Even by the standards of the Lone Star State, the claim by two Texas researchers -- Douglas C. Burger and Stephen W. Keckler -- can seem a trifle grandiose. "We're reinventing the computer," asserts Keckler.

A glance at their backers, though, dispels some of the skepticism. IBM (IBM ) is working closely with the two University of Texas computer scientists. And the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2001 handed them $11 million in development funds. Now, IBM is gearing up to manufacture the first prototype of their concept for a radically new computer-brain chip. If it delivers what Burger and Keckler promise, high-tech gurus are betting it will spawn a new family of superchips from Big Blue -- chips capable of crunching a trillion calculations every second.

Such blistering speed would itself be amazing; it's roughly the oomph of a $50 million supercomputer in 1997. But more impressive, the chip can rewire itself on the fly -- a feat known as reconfigurable computing. With this technology, a future Macintosh from Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL ) might rejigger the circuitry on its PowerPC chip and then run software written for Intel (INTC ) Corp.'s microprocessors. Or an iPod music player could turn into a handheld computer -- or detect an incoming call and convert itself into a cell phone.

[evilwarmaster]

Us Texas people have standards? What? I could get political if I wanted to...Oops, there's my name on the Department of Homeland Security computers...

[BJ_M]

sounds like a spinoff of the cell cpu