Intel has recently introduced a new processor. It is code-named Knight's Corner and it can process a wondrous one teraflop per second. That means one trillion floating point operations per second, which is a measure of how many sums can be done per second. But why does this matter at all to a sign-maker? Well, as we know workflow is all about speed and processing data as efficiently as possible. A chip that can process one trillion calculations per second could do wonders for a tired old RIP technology based on an Intel Core i7 extreme processor snoozily calculating at 3.3Ghz per second.

In fact the new Intel chip is more interesting than just being quicker than its predecessors or the competition. The Knight's Corner chip is a Many Integrated Core (MIC) coprocessor which takes over the grunt computing tasks from a computer's central processing unit (CPU). And Knight's Corner isn't really a single chip, more a bagful of them since it holds over 50 individual processors. This is a bit of a departure from the path Intel's competitors are taking. AMD and Nvidia for instance are developing Graphics Processing Units instead. GPUs are designed so that different bits of the processor do different things in order to perform a given computing task. This appears to be a more complicated way of doing things than using raw horsepower, and would probably require a rather different approach to programming. Intel seems to prefer the grunt power approach.

A supercomputer on a chip

All this power brings obvious benefits in terms of processing speed and complexity, but Knight's Corner also has some other benefits. For instance it includes technology for transferring data at rates of up to 32 gigabytes (that's 1,000,000,000 bytes) per second. This makes sharing large amounts of data even easier, so Intel has high hopes for this technology particularly for computing applications which require huge amounts of data processing, such as climatology. It is also an important part of Intel's strategy for serving cloud computing applications.

How long it will take for the impact of this technology to make itself known in the wide-format printing market depends on the speed with which applications develop. Fully rendered graphic arts files are massive, and even more massive if they are printed on wide-format machines. But it is clear that colour accuracy and quality demands are here to stay in the sector, so having semiconductors that support massive file sizes and data distribution can't be bad. We will just have to wait and see how the developer community will exploit Knights Corner's possibilities.