Like the computers before them, supercomputers have been
confined to large warehouses that only institutions with very
deep pockets can afford. As the obsessive need for computation
power continues to overwhelm all parts of our lives, progression
to bring TeraFLOP (trillion floating point operations per
second) computing into our homes becomes ever closer. Current
CPUs provide a few GigaFLOPs of computation power, but are very
general in their application. The TeraFLOP processing units
shown off by Intel, along with current generation graphics cards
from AMD and Nvidia that have GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics
Processing Unit) functionality, all provide computation power
far in excess of CPUs but their application is much more
specialised. When Intel first showcased its 80-core processor,
people were confused by how we went straight from quad-core to
eighty cores. In fact, it is just a research project
investigating the process of making a tiled array of processors
and chip stacking. At IDF this year, Intel a