Intel chip performs 10 trillion calculations per second

April 18, 2018

Because of the Intel® Stratix® 10’s unique design, it can whip through calculations at blinding speeds – often 10 to 100 times faster than the chips in consumer devices. Intel Stratix 10 FPGAs – the latest version came out in February – are capable of 10 TFLOPS, or 10 trillion floating point operations per second. The Stratix 10 is the fastest chip of its kind in the world.

FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays, are a special class of computer chip that is surging in importance with the rise of applications like speech-recognition, artificial intelligence, next-generation wireless networks, advanced search engines and high-performance computing.

Unlike traditional central processing units (CPUs) that power today’s laptops and desktops, FPGAs can be customized – or reprogrammed remotely and on the fly – to perform highly specialized computing tasks.

Intel’s Rebecca Nevin, an outreach manager for the Intel FPGA University Program, holds an Intel Stratix 10 Field Programmable Gate Array. The Stratix 10 contains about 30 billion transistors – more than triple the number of transistors in the chips that run today’s fastest laptops and desktops – and can process the data equivalent to 420 Blu-ray Discs in just one second. (Credit: Tim Herman/Intel Corporation)