Intel Says Welcome to the 'Era of Tera'

Intel is unveiling a new programmable multi-core processor this week the vendor says marks the beginning of 'Tera-scale' computing. Intel claims the compact 80-core chip is the first to deliver the trillions-of-calculations-per-second performance that will be used in future generations of PCs and servers. Intel is outlining details of the research chip this week at the Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.

The explosive growth of multi-core chips with low power consumption will drive the mass adoption of virtualized computing environments. Massive scale multi-core processors will shift how we think about servers and operating systems to the next level. Steven Schuchart NWC Contributing Editor

The company says by providing teraflop performance, and the capability to transfer terabytes of data while using less electricity than the average home appliance, Tera-scale technology has the potential to power the deployment of innovative future applications for a variety of purposes including education, collaboration, artificial intelligence, data mining and entertainment. Intel won't sell this particular processor with floating point cores, but instead says the chip provides its researchers with invaluable data with respect to specialized processor and core functions as well as how these super high-speed processors would work both with other chips and with the computers themselves in a production environment.