A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflop) has been unveiled by Intel. The Teraflop chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm.
The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it. The challenge is to find a way to program the many cores simultaneously.
Current desktop machines have up to four separate cores, while the Cell processor inside the PlayStation 3 has eight (seven of them useable). Each core is effectively a programmable chip in its own right.
But to take advantage of the extra processing power, programmers need to gives instructions to each core that work in parallel with one another.
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