Intel Corp (INTC)

[sgolds]

ClearSpeed floating point processor - threat to Itanium?

I'd like to see a market and technology analysis of this potential competitor. ClearSpeed made a specialized floating point processor (Array Processor) which can be configured as a co-processor to x86 chips (presumably Xeon or Opteron). Seems like they are able to reduce costs (and heat) by focussing on this one problem, rather than trying to make a general purpose processor like Itanium.

There are some very good minds here that can give a good analysis. I look forward to it!

http://www.clearspeed.com/news.php?pr=17

SAN JOSE, Calif., October 14th, 2003 -- ClearSpeed Technology, a leading provider of high performance, low power chip-based solutions, today announced the ClearSpeed CS301, a multi-threaded array processor that enables dramatic improvements in performance and power consumption for intensive floating point applications. At over 25 GFLOPS peak performance, the new chip provides more than twice the processing speed of competitive products. At 10 GFLOPS per Watt, power consumption is also twenty times more efficient. As a result, the CS301 delivers up to a ninety percent reduction in purchase price and running costs, making high performance computing affordable and available to companies of all sizes.
...
The CS301 can serve either as a co-processor alongside an Intel or AMD CPU within a high performance workstation, blade server or cluster configuration, or as a standalone processor for embedded DSP applications like radar pulse compression or image processing.

P.S.: Thanks to kpf on the AMD board for finding this.