April 25, 2007—Raytheon Company recently announced that the company and its partners have developed the world’s first computers whose architecture can adopt different forms depending on their application. Raytheon also believes the new computer is the most power-efficient processor available.
Dubbed MONARCH (Morphable Networked Micro-Architecture) and developed to address the large data volume of sensor systems as well as their signal and data processing throughput requirements, it is reportedly the most adaptable processor ever built for the Department of Defense, reducing the number of processor types required.
MONARCH performs as a single system on a chip, resulting in a significant reduction of the number of processors required for computing systems, and it performs in an array of chips for teraflop throughput, says Raytheon.
In addition to the ability to adapt its architecture for a particular objective, the MONARCH computer is believed to be the most power-efficient processor available, claims Raytheon, outperforming the Intel quad-core Xeon chip by a factor of 10 in laboratory testing.
Raytheon says that MONARCH, containing six microprocessors and a highly interconnected reconfigurable computing array, provides 64 gigaflops (floating point operations per second) with more than 60 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth and more than 43 gigabytes per second of off-chip data bandwidth.
For more information visit Raytheon.
