TRIPS architecture

TRIPS was a microprocessor architecture designed by a team at the University of Texas at Austin in conjunction with IBM, Intel, and Sun Microsystems. TRIPS uses an instruction set architecture designed to be easily broken down into large groups of instructions (Graphs) that can be run on independent processing elements. The design collects related data into the graphs, attempting to avoid expensive data reads and writes and keeping the data in high speed memory close to the processing elements. The prototype TRIPS processor contains 16 such elements. TRIPS hoped to reach 1 TFLOP on a single processor, as papers were published from 2003 to 2006.