Simplicity makes for superfast computing By I. Peterson A radically new approach to computer design promises to deliver a supercomputer 500 times faster than any available today. Such a high-performance machine would be capable of performing more than 1 quadrillion operations per second. The proposed machine would consist of about 1 million processors, which would share the computational load.
Simplicity is key to the supercomputer's anticipated speed.
Processors in today's computers typically carry several hundred built-in commands. Most of those instructions, however, aren't actually used in many types of scientific computations. The IBM design cuts the number of instructions per processor down to a considerably more manageable 57. Moreover, each processor would be able to handle eight tasks at once instead of having to complete one task before going on to the next. Each of the computer's 32,000 microchips would hold 32 processors and 32 high-performance memory units for storing information and sharing it among processors.