Clearspeed had announced in June of this year plans to introduce an add-in card carrying two co-processors that are capable of adding 50 GFlops of performance to a workstation. The card, based on PCI-X, is likely to ship in the fourth quarter of this year. In Q1 of 2006, Clearspeed will add a PCI Express version of the card - also carrying two co-processors delivering 25 GFlops each.

During a demonstration at IDF, the PCI Express - consuming a total of just 25 watts - card showed a performance peak of about 55 GFlops with a minimum of about 45 GFlops. Putting this into perspective, a 2-way Xeon system with 3.2 GHz processors was shown running parallel to the card with a peak performance of about 10 GFlops.

The obvious advantage of the PCI Express x8 version of the card is a much broader workstation market as well as a higher bandwidth capability compared to the PCI-X model. Theoretically, maximum is 1 GByte per second up and down, which is estimated to be a more realistic 750 MByte per second each way in everyday use.

Pricing as not been announced yet, but the fact that a "CSX600" card is not a volume product already indicates that boards won't come cheap. Company representatives declined to specify a possible price but mention that 2-processor cards will run somewhere in a range of $1000 to $10,000. (THG)

Related stories:
Co-processors to accelerate desktop PC to 50 GFlops