Support our non-partisan non-profit newsroom 💜 Donate now

One tiny chip, one trillion operations per second

Scott Jagow Feb 12, 2007

TEXT OF INTERVIEW

SCOTT JAGOW: Intel shows off a new computer chip today that can do a trillion calculations per second, but it uses the energy of one 60-watt light bulb. A decade ago it took 10,000 of these processors and 16 light bulbs to do the job. Technology expert Barry Fox is with us. Barry, how big of a breakthrough is this?

BARRY FOX: What really excited me about this is not so much that the new chip will be able to do what would previously have been done by a room full of equipment, it’s that it uses much less power, much less electricity. It looks to me like this could signal a much more significant change in the way Intel makes chips and thereby make portable laptops, PDAs run cooler and run longer on their batteries.

JAGOW: Can you give us some idea of how much faster this chip really is?

FOX: Well we get into this area of teraflops.

JAGOW: And that’s t-e-r-a?

FOX: T-e-r-a. When we first used computers, they were running at kilohertz, that’s thousands of operations a second. Then they went to megahertz, which is millions. Then they went to gigahertz which is thousands of millions, and now we’re going to tera which is thousands of gigas.

JAGOW: What would you need that much power for?

FOX: You need that power when you do things that have to be very clever. Probably the best example is speech recognition. In other words, you and I are talking and as we talk our conversation is not only recognized, but also it can be converted into another language.

JAGOW: Wow.

FOX: And that has been always the Holy Grail.

JAGOW: Well this is pretty amazing stuff. Barry thanks so much.

FOX: It’s a pleasure.

JAGOW: IT expert Barry Fox.

There’s a lot happening in the world.  Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. 

You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. 

Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.