San Jose (CA) - Yet another sign that the good old workstation may not be extinct: Clearspeed will demonstrate on Tuesday a co-processor PCI-X add-in card that has promises a floating point performance to 50 GFlops - about 10x the performance of a regular desktop PC.

High-end desktop PCs recently took on the role of the traditional workstation in recent years. Fierce competition in hardware and software pushed speed levels of performance PCs in a region that made it difficult for expensive workstation systems to highlight their added benefits. New innovations however set the workstation apart from a consumer desktop and could be able to bridge the widening gap to supercomputers.

Clearspeed, which has announced co-processor chips for desktop PCs in 2003 and 2004, will announce on Tuesday that it prepares to ship its first production-ready product. The company claims that new chip, named CSX600, is the world's fastest 64-bit floating point processor, delivering a sustained performance of 25 GFlops. CSX600 boards will integrate two processors delivering 50 GFlops. Since the boards follow the single-slot PCI-X standard, there only limitation of the number of boards in a system is determined by the number of available slots. Clearspeed said that two cards, for example, will deliver 100 GFlops.

What makes Clearspeed's card attractive is the fact that it can be installed in an existing computer within minutes and immediately can result in added performance for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Speed increases however are purely limited to floating point operations and mainly address traditional workstation environments - such as scientific applications in the biological or network simulation segment. According to Clearspeed, enthusiasts can also take advantage of the added performance, especially with professional audio and precision rendering software. Per card, such applications can gain about 5x to 10x in speed, the company said.

The CSX600's real estate consists about half of logic and half of memory. The 128-million-transistor chip is built in a 130 nm process and integrates 96 cores with a clock speed of 250 MHz. The low clock speed allows keeping power consumption down at about 10 watts per chip and 25 watts per board, according to Clearspeed. CSX600 boards also offer two banks for DDR2 memory per processor - totaling in 4 GByte of DDR2 per board. On-chip memory bandwidth is rated at 200 GByte per second.

Clearspeed said it will be shipping CSX600 boards this fall, but declined to comment on a price. "Competitive pricing" and "negligible investment for corporations" were the most detailed answers we got. The question however remains who the competitors of the CSX600 in fact are. If the company considers traditional high end workstations as competition, then such boards may become available in the low four-figure range. If the competition are other revival workstations such as Orion Multisystems' computers than such cards are unlikely to be priced below $10,000.

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