Intel Tests Chip Design With 80-Core Processor

I was thrilled to see the news that Intel was testing an 80-core processor. Not that such a chip by itself will be terribly useful for much more than research, experimentation, and niche applications, but it heralds a bigger leap into what I call ultra-massively parallel computing with thousands or even tens of thousands of simpler processors on a single chip, and a form of computing hardware that will finally be able to enable hard-core use of software agent technology where you have many thousands of lightweight processes running within a single system.

The computing infrastructure of the future will be based not upon very complex cores, but very large numbers of simple cores.

Nonetheless, this news of an 80-core chip is a truly exciting advance.

-- Jack Krupansky