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> capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second

> To reach this point it has taken £15million in funding, 20 years in conception and over 10 years in construction, with the initial build starting way back in 2006.

Wow, those numbers.. and 10 years to build... I’d be very excited to turn it on!

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15 million in funding for 1 million processors? So every processor cost only 15£? That sounds pretty good to me.

"The chip is a Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) system with 18 ARM968 processor nodes"[1]

So, 18 cores per chip. 55,556 chips. £270 per chip.

Still pretty good, considering the £15M is paying for more than a pile of chips.

[1] http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/SpiNNchip/

The unit cost of a chip isn't too much. The price of doing the design and creating the masks for the silicon OTOH...

At that time scale it probably would be cheaper to wait 10 years and then build it with cheaper faster processors.

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