We’ve always perceived super computers as being housed in oversized cabinets, a far cry from the personal computer that we all use in our homes.  But the genius of Intel might change things, as it today unveiled Knights Corner, a processor the size of a small chip but with the power of a 1 teraflop supercomputer. It’s built on the so-called “Many Integrated Core” or MIC architecture. There’s no word on the price just yet.

Currently, the world’s fastest computer is Fujitsu’s K supercomputer, which runs at 10.51 petaflops and can calculate more than 10 quadrillion calculations per second. FLOPS stands for floating point operation per second, used to measure supercomputer’s processing ability.  A petaflop is equivalent to 1×10 to the 15th power floating point per second –multiply it by 10 and that’s the power of K computer.  However, K computer eats up 864 racks and 88,128 parallel-liked, eight-core CPUs to achieve this benchmark. That’s a lot of occupied space and computer units.

On the other hand, Intel’s Knights Corner is only the size of a chip but has a power equivalent to 1×10 to the power of 12, or 1 trillion calculations per second. Intel’s latest consumer-grade processor, the Intel i7 processor, has 6 cores that can do 158Gflops or 158 billion calculations per second. Knights Corner can do 6 times faster.

Moreover, it is built on Intel’s three dimensional tri-gate tech, which runs on microscopically small 22 nanometer silicon. Compare that to Intel’s current 32 nm Sandy Bridge chips and its 10 nanometer smaller. It’s also unique in that it’s full accessible and programmable, which means it’ll be visible to applications as though it was a computer than runs its own Linux-based operating system independent of the host OS.

The chipset power battle roars on

Intel’s been lagging behind in a few areas of the chipset market, losing ground to ARM with HP’s Project Moonshot, and in the mobile realm at large.  Moonshot marks HP’s departure from x86 architecture, moving on to what they call “Extreme Scale Computing.”  It will feature ARM-based, low energy technology, promoting advances in hyperscale, even peaking the interest of Cantor Fitzegerald.  ARM’s been on a tear lately, working on its ARMv8 architecture, the first ARM to include a 64-bit instruction set.

Then there’s Quantum, which announced some noteworthy upgrades this week.  The following have recently gotten a boost: DX18500 disk system, the Scalar i600 tape library, and Quantum Vision storage and backup analytics tool. The company claims that the DX18500 disk system is “the fastest and highest-capacity single deduplication appliance.”