Texan team creates "chameleon" chip

A TEXAN TEAM HAS created an experimental chip, designed to change its function depending on what needs doing. It can be configured for cell phones and mp3 players, but can also be configured to act as a powerful processor for desktop PCs, according to a report on the Dow Jones news service and in the Wall St Journal.

Steve Keckler, the leader of the Texan university team hopes to finish a prototype of the device in a year or so, and is expecting a completed chip for around 2010. The plan is to have the chip running at a top speed of 10GHz, and performing up to one trillion operations per second, the report says. The latest Intel processors run at around 3.4GHz and deliver 6.8 billion operations per second.

Keckler's team are collaborating with IBM, calling the tech a "supercomputer on a chip". They're being funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but aren't the only ones in the country aiming for a similar chip - universities such as Stanford University and the University of Southern Caifornia are both going for it too, albeit with different approaches.

The device is, at the moment, called "Trips" - standing for Tera-Op Reliable Intelligently Adaptive Processing System. "Tera-Op" is referring to the trillion operations per second it will hopefully perform. µ