Intel Announces New Chip with 80-Core Processor

Intel Corp. has introduced their latest development, the Teraflops Research Chip from the Intel Tera-scale Computing Research Program. This is the first of Intel's silicon tera-scale research prototypes. It is also the first programmable chip to deliver more than one trillion floating point operations per second (1 Teraflops) of performance while consuming very little power.

Intel's research project is focusing on exploring new energy-efficient designs for future multi-core chips and other approaches to interconnect and core-to-core communications. The research chip incorporates 80 simple cores, each containing two programmable floating point engines. This is the most ever to be integrated on a single chip. Floating point engines are used for accurate calculations, such as for graphics as well as financial and scientific modeling. In terms of circuit design, they are more complex than integer engines, which just process instructions.

There are currently no plans by Intel to bring the Teraflops Research Chip to the general retail market. Intel is using it to test new technologies such as high-bandwidth interconnects, energy management techniques, and a tile design method to build multicore chips. Intel engineers are further using the chip to explore new forms of tera-scale computing, where future users could process terabytes of data on their desktops to perform real-time speech recognition, multimedia data mining, photo-realistic gaming and artificial intelligence.