The future of CPUs developed with $15m of DARPA's cash

Not so much something you'll be seeing on the shelves of Best Buy in the next few months, but a sign of the guts of future gadgets and tech-toys: a team at the University of Texas at Austin have managed to craft what they're calling a "supercomputer on a chip".  Unlike conventional multi-core processors, which rely on software being coded specially to take advantage of parallel data pathways, TRIPS (or Tera-op Reliable Intelligently Adaptive Processing System to be official) is a collection of CPU architecture streamlining techniques

For instance, rather than send individual blocks of instructions, TRIPS can compile up to 128 into a single package, and have that addressed all at once.  Packages can be dealt with as soon as they arrive at the core, instead of waiting for the pre-defined order, and there are a variety of ways the calculations are grouped and fast-tracked.

DARPA obviously sees promise in TRIPS, as they've invested $15.4m and are hoping that the architecture will end up in an off-the-shelf component not only revolutionising home computing but capable of 1-trillion sustained operations per-second for the most demanding of government applications. 

Supercomputer on a Chip [Computer World]