Researchers tout breakthrough in single chip parallel processing
Researchers at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering have developed a prototype of what they say could be the "next generation" of personal computers, one that's apparently 100 times faster than current desktop PCs. That considerable feat was made possible though the use of parallel processing on a single chip, in this case, cramming 64 processors onto a circuit board the size of a license plate. Just as importantly, the researchers also developed the necessary software to ensure all that computing muscle gets along, which they say makes the system "feasible for general-purpose computing tasks" for the first time. They don't appear to be content with things just yet though, saying that the same principles could one day be applied to systems with 1,000 processors on a chip the size of a finger nail.
