Indians play major role in developing Intel's Tera Chip

Bangalore, Feb 22 (UNI) Indians working in Intel's India Development Centre (IIDC) in the city had a major role to play in the leading chip maker's developmet of the world's first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-line performance from a single 80-core chip.

The development of finger nail sized chip was the result of the company's innovative 'Tera-scale computing' research, aimed at delivering Teraflops -- or trillions of calculations per second -- performance for the future PCs and servers.

The IIDC, in which the US-based company had committed investment of 1.7 billion US Dollars, contributed 50 per cent of the work, in terms of logic, circuit and physical design.

The IIDC's engineering team working on the Teraflops Research Chip, for which the company had begun talks with prospective customers and partners to develop it into a product for the emerging market, was led by Ms Vasantha Erraguntla, a 15-year Intel veteran and Engineering Manager, Intel India. This team was part of Intel Corporate Technology Group's city-based Circuit Research Labs set up in 2004.

Having presence in ten major cities in India, Intel employed over 3,000 Indians in its R and D facility in the city, which was among the top three data centres of the company outside the US.

Interacting with newspersons about the work done on the Teraflop in the country at the IIDC today, Ms Erraguntla said the focus team here had demonstrated immense talent and potential.

''With this advancement of 'era of tera', we have established without doubt the power of global collaboration and the capabilities of Indian engineering talent. It feels great to lead and be part of a team that is contributing to Intel's global innovation and the future of technology,'' she said.

She said the chips would be used in the near future in trillions of operations in entertainment, learning and travel, personal media creation and management. For example, artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition - once deemed as science fiction in 'Star Trek' shows, could become every day realities.

Mr Praveen Vishakantaiah, Director of Digital Enterprise Group, Intel Technology India, said that in IIDC, a product was developed by building micro architecture, then designing the chip itself by putting together transistors, and validation and testing or pre-silica validation was the final step.

UNI