Intel Plans 80 Core Chips

Intel has developed an 80 core processor, and plans to have it ready for commercial production within five years. CNET News reports that Intelis prototype can perform a trillion floating-point operations per second.

The announcement came at Intelis twice-a-year Developer Forum where the company discusses its development road map with software and hardware designers.

The prototype processor uses 80 floating-point cores running at 3.16GHz, and will use an on-chip interconnect fabric and stacked static RAM attached to the bottom of the processor to move information between the individual cores.

Part of the path to the 80 core processor is unfolding now with new four-processor chips scheduled for release over the next few months. A new quad-core Core 2 Extreme processor is scheduled for a November release, and the Core 2 Quad for desktop computers will debut in the first quarter of next year.

Intel claims the Core 2 Quad processors will offer a 70 percent integer performance improvement over the Core 2 Duo. Paul Otellini, Intelis CEO, commented "Performance matters again."