Era of Tera

Intel researchers have developed the world's first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip.

This is the result of the company's "Tera-scale computing" research aimed at delivering Teraflops - or trillions of calculations per second - performance for future PCs and servers.

Tera-scale performance, and the ability to move terabytes of data, will play a pivotal role in future computers with ubiquitous access to the Internet by powering new applications for education and collaboration, as well as enabling the rise of high-definition entertainment on PCs, servers and handheld devices.

Intel has no plans to bring this exact chip designed with floating point cores to market. However, the company's Tera-scale research is instrumental in investigating specialized processor or core functions, the types of chip-to-chip and chip-to-computer interconnects required to best move data and, most importantly, how software will need to be designed to best leverage multiple processor cores. This Teraflops research chip offered specific insights in new silicon design methodologies, high-bandwidth interconnects and energy management approaches.