Intel Develops 80-Core Research Chip

Intel(INTC) researchers have developed a chip packing 80 individual cores, promising to bring supercomputing brawn to PCs within five to 10 years.

Intel plans to provide key details on its so-called Teraflop research chip in a paper at the International Solid State Circuits Conference taking place in San Francisco this week. The chip was first unveiled by CEO Paul Otellini at the company's developer conference last year.

Company officials stressed that the 80-core chip was not a future product per se, but rather a demonstration of various new technologies developed by the company that will eventually trickle into Intel products. The chip is based on new design and architecture that Intel says will allow it to deliver a "teraflop" of performance -- 1 trillion calculations per second, while consuming the same amount of power as current desktop processor.

Intel first achieved teraflop performance in 1996, with the ASCI Red Supercomputer that it built for Sandia National Laboratory. That computer featured 10,000 Pentium Pro processors dispersed in 100 cabinets within a 2,000-square-foot space, and consumed 500 kilowatts of electricity.

The new teraflop chip measures just 275 millimeters, slightly larger than a fingernail, while consuming 62 watts.

"It points the way to the near future when Teraflops-capable designs will be commonplace and reshape what we can all expect from our computers and the Internet at home and in the office," Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said in a statement.