“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,” Otis Port reports for BusinessWeek. “A glance at their backers, though, dispels some of the skepticism. IBM s 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.”
Port reports, “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. might rejigger the circuitry on its PowerPC chip and then run software written for Intel 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.”
Full article here.
So, are these chips female?
I’ve heard this before: Transmeta Crusoe was hyped to do this even though it doesn’t do that at all.
Now, a TFlop is an awful lot for a single processor. The Cell can do a fifth of that and it’s absolutely HUGE.
The article draws a incompatibility between IBM computers and Macs. DUH! Who makes the G5? IBM.
This is just dumb. I’ll see it when I believe it. What a bunch of drivel. The article just talks about a bunch of other chips and says nothing.
the last thing i want is my computer or iPod to be bipolar.
The plane!, the plane! Welcome to fantasy island.
Yuk. Why would I want my processor morphing itself into Wintel crud handling?@!* Keep it pure and a million miles away from anything Windows please.
Oh, and I’ll have half a dozen and keyboard please.
An interesting read, this story has less to do with emerging technology as is does about IBM keeping Apple as a customer. So is the “cell-based Blade Server prototype” story:
(http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/5880/)
These have been put out there to counter the Apple wooing by Intel lately:
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/5861/
I’m not disputing the facts of the story, but the subtext is much more interesting! The fact is, OS X is the best OS out there, the PC makers know it, and the games have begun!
-AP
most will turn into a virus with an interface
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t reconfigurable computing using FPGA’s (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) instead of regular general-purpose chips promised by a company named Starbridge Systems? From what I remember, the hype several years ago claimed that FPGA’s can be programmed on the fly to emulate any architecture, so you could, for instance, have it emulate an extremely fast x86 to run Windows apps, then reconfigure it to emulate an equally fast PowerPC. Anybody heard anything more about them?