Mighty Morphing Power Processors: "Mighty Morphing Power Processors IBM and others are racing to create chameleon chips that change to suit the job

Even by the standards of the Lone Star State, the claim by two Texas researchers -- Douglas C. Burger and Stephen W. Keckler -- can seem a trifle grandiose. 'We're reinventing the computer,' asserts Keckler.

A glance at their backers, though, dispels some of the skepticism. IBM (IBM
) is working closely with the two University of Texas computer scientists. And the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2001 handed them $11 million in development funds. Now, IBM is gearing up to manufacture the first prototype of their concept for a radically new computer-brain chip. If it delivers what Burger and Keckler promise, high-tech gurus are betting it will spawn a new family of superchips from Big Blue -- chips capable of crunching a trillion calculations every second.

Such blistering speed would itself be amazing; it's roughly the oomph of a $50 million supercomputer in 1997. But more impressive, the chip can rewire itself on the fly -- a feat known as reconfigurable computing. With this technology, a future Macintosh from Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL
) might rejigger the circuitry on its PowerPC chip and then run software written for Intel (INTC
) Corp.'s microprocessors. Or an iPod music player could turn into a handheld computer -- or detect an incoming call and convert itself into a cell phone.
IBM is hardly the only chipmaker chasing morphing semiconductors. Virtually every major supplier of so-called logic chips is working on some such notion, including Hewlett-Packard (HPQ
), Intel, NEC (NIPNY
), Philips Electronics (PHG
), and Texas Instruments (TXN
). A dozen or more startups are in the race as well, including Velogix, picoChip Designs, and MathStar."