Could supercomputing turn to signal processors (again)?

A Texas team says digital signal processors could compete in high-performance computing. Building high performance computers used to be all about maximizing flops, or floating point operations per second. But the engineers designing today's high-performance systems are keeping a close eye not just on the number of flops but also on flops per watt. Judged by that energy-efficiency metric, some digital-signal processing (DSP) chips - the sophisticated signal conditioners that run our wireless networks, among other things - might make promising building blocks for future supercomputers, recent research suggests. This article notes how TI engineers added floating-point hardware to the TMS320C66 family of multicore DSPs late in 2010 without appreciably slowing these processors down or increasing the power consumed.