A Supercomputer in Your Pocket

Containing 80 processors, or cores, the new chip consumes 1000 times less power than its 1996 counterpart and could be made to perform at a rate of one teraflop, or a trillion floating point operations per second.

But this is only the beginning. Within five to ten years, Intel plans even more dense—and therefore faster—massively multi-core processors. Engineering manager and lab project head Nitin Borkar says the goal is to use the new 80 processor chip to flesh out designs that could make future multi-core hardware more powerful, energy-efficient, and easier to program.

Parallel programming—writing code for multicore machines—isn't easy. Software applications will have to be completely rewritten in order to take advantage of future advancements in processing power. Intel believes that recognition, mining, and synthesis (RMS) applications will be the ticket—technologies that may allow real-time video search by image or spoken sentences, real-time cell phone language translation, and advanced systems to help with health care, shopping, and meal planning.

From From Technology Review