Intel Hopes Your Phone Could Double as a Supercomputer in Five Years

  • ARM controls much of the mobile chip world, while Intel has dominated the server world. Now, ARM is looking to put cellphone chips in supercomputers and Intel is working on integrating supercomputer capabilities into smartphones.
  • With its experimental Single-chip Cloud Computer, or SCC, Intel hopes to turn smartphones into supercomputers in the next five years. The company is looking into possible mobile applications for SCC and is creating tools for developers to take advantage of the technology.
  • “Intel Labs has been working on many-core chips since around 2004,” Wired explains, “and the more immediate applications will probably be in servers and, yes, supercomputers, which are essentially a bunch of servers working in tandem. This is often called high-performance computing, or HPC.”
  • “HPC depends on parallel processing — breaking down big problems into smaller problems that are solved by different processors running in parallel,” the article continues. “What Intel Labs is now researching is whether this approach will make sense for mobile computing.”
  • The technology could be used in augmented reality applications and rendering 3D graphics for games.
  • The distinction between mobile hardware and data-center hardware is fading as big data-center operations look for ultra-low-power profiles of cellphones and mobile devices strive for the computational power of larger systems.
  • ARM’s challenge to Intel’s SCC is its new chip called Atlas that aspires to launch ARM into the server world.

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