John West found some news that a japanese company “Tops Systems Corp” has partnered with Toyota Motors and Nihon Unisys to build a dedicated ray-tracing IC that sounds very similar to the previously announced Caustic offerings.
Tops Systems Corp of Japan, a venture involved in multicore technology, together with Toyota Motor Corp and Nihon Unisys Ltd, both of Japan, is developing a dedicated integrated circuit (IC) for ray tracing*, an image rendering method used in 3D computer graphics (3D CG) processing. A total of 73 heterogeneous cores designed specifically for ray tracing operations will be single-chipped, and nine of these chips interconnected (see Fig). With high-definition (HD) resolution at 1920 x 1080 pixels, the target processing speed is 800 tera floating point operations per second (TFLOPS).
A commenter is careful to spell out a few more details:
It’s actually the total system performance that is aiming to be 800 TFLOPS (presumably sufficient to meet their visualisation/performance requirements).
Each on of the nine dedicated devices, is specified to produce 88 TFLOPS and each is comprised of numerous cooperating clusters of very specialised cores (with limited amounts of local memory). Think of this as the ray-tracing equivalent of the MD-GRAPE machines!
Has the age of real-time Ray Tracing finally come?
800TFLOPS Multicore IC for Realtime RayTracing via insideHPC.com.
Hm, Toyota knows what they should do and they are really among the best car builders of the world. I have no complains with them.