While we mere mortals are all happy with our dual-core processors and all excited about the upcoming quad-core processors, several researchers from Tokyo University are secretly snickering at us. But of course, they have all the right to do so since they invented a 512-core processor known as the Grape DR chip.

To be accurate, the processor is not a replacement for our favorite Intels and AMDs, but sits on a PCI-X card providing number-crunching power. Even though the processor runs at just 500MHz, it is capable of delivering 512GLOPS (512 billion floating-point operations every second). To put things into perspective, our modern processors are only capable of performing at a few GFLOPS.

The 512 cores are split into 16 groups of 32, each group capable of processing a single type of FP instruction. The chip itself measures 17 x 17mm and contains 300m transistors. It consumes up to 60W of power.

The researchers actually started working on this project since 2004. By 2008, they hope to accomplish a prototype capable of delivering 2PFLOPS (two quadrillion floating-point operations a second, 3906.25 times faster than 512GLOPS).