EL SEGUNDO, Calif., March 20 (UPI) -- A computer chip has been developed to better handle the U.S. military's growing volume of electronic data and reduce the size of processing equipment.
The MONARCH (Morphable Networked Micro-Architecture) acts as an entire system on a single chip and has the ability to adapt its function to the application that is being run, promising to reduce the number of chips needed in a device but not its versatility or capacity.
"The MONARCH micro-architecture is unique in its ability to reconfigure itself to optimize processing on the fly," summed up Raytheon Vice President Nick Uros. "MONARCH provides exceptional compute capacity and highly flexible data bandwidth capability with beyond state-of-the-art power efficiency, and it's fully programmable."
MONARCH is part of a Pentagon project to create computer processors that are very small, require minimal power and can in some cases withstand a radiation environment experienced by orbiting satellites. Raytheon is involved in the project with an industry team that includes IBM, Mercury Computer Systems as well as university researchers.
Raytheon said in a news release Tuesday that MONARCH outperformed the high-powered Intel quad-core Xeon chip "by a factor of 10." The specifics included 64 gigaflops (floating point operations per second) with 60 gigabytes per second of memory and 43 gigabytes per second of off-chip data bandwidth.
