Fujitsu opened this year’s Fujitsu Forum conference by kicking Intel squarely in the groin, debuting a new processor that’s 2.5 times faster than anything the CPU giant has on offer, and one third as power-hungry.
Called the SPARC64 VIIIfx (sexy codename: “Venus”), this eight-cored slab of processor can crunch a staggering 128 gigaflops. This is amazing, but irrelevant to most of us—in case you haven’t already guessed from the processor’s size and Fujitsu’s proud emphasis on its floating point calculation abilities, the Venus is destined to be clustered in supercomputers when it eventually ships, not plugged into your next custom PC build. [Impress Watch via The Inquirer]
matt
Friday, May 15, 2009 at 9:58 AMas i said before, if floating point ops are its target market, it gets kicked in the groin by commonly available consumer gpus, that are in the Tflops. however, gpus rely on high parallelism (like 100s of cores), so if for some reason you were against extreme parallelism, id guess this processor can do more flops per thread than anything else, could make a cool vector co-processor for a games console.