At the moment this is bad news for Intel as all of South Korea’s High Performance Computing (HPC) have Chipzilla inside, but might cause a few problems outside South Korea too.

Reports say the researchers were tasked to design a CPU that was more than twice as fast as the accelerators used in the current generation of supercomputers while consuming less than half the power.

The reports quote Youngsu Kwon from the AI Processor Research Department at ETRI as saying that the researchers tackled their brief by focussing on single chip performance for low power chips and systems.

“From there you can integrate more chips, increasing the performance and reducing power consumed. Also, the integration of CPUs and accelerators into a single chip will allow more bandwidth, which can remove the data bandwidth bottleneck”, he wrote.

They achieved this by combining the ARM Zeus high-performance chips with ETRI’s scalable AI/HPC cores together with multiple DDR5 high-bandwidth memory (HBM) interfaces. The result of their efforts is the K-AB21, which packs 16 teraflops per CPU for a combined output of 1600 teraflops per rack.

The chip is expected to be available by the end of 2021.