TOPS Systems Corporation, a Japanese company has announced a massive, 800 teraflop real-time ray tracing (RTRT) system that gangs together nine, 73-core chips into a single system that fits inside a desktop computer form factor. The new chip, which is being jointly developed with Toyota and Unisys, is aimed at the auto industry, where designers will use it to prototype body designs and paint combinations. The overall system consists of nine identical, 45nm ASICs ganged together via some unspecified interconnect scheme. Each individual ASIC consists of nine compute clusters connected to one another through a shared bus. This bus (diagram) also hosts a 64-bit RISC master controller that presumably takes in work in batches and assigns it to the other eight cores, which then do the grunt work of computing the rays; there are also I/O and memory interfaces attached to this shared bus, which link the chip to the rest of the system.

More info: ARS