This CNET News story reports that Intel demoed a prototype PC processor with a whopping 80 cores to members of the press last week. The processor, which can handle 1 trillion floating-point operations per second, is expected to be released in five years. The demo chip ran at 3.16GHz and used a special motherboard and cooling system made especially for the demo (and no it can't run Windows Vista since it is not based on the x86 instruction set).

At 0.95 volts and 3.16 GHz - the clock speed that was indicated at the fall developer forum - the processor provides a data bandwidth of 1.62 Tb/s and a floating point performance of 1.01 TFlops, according to Intel. About ten years ago, Intel needed more than 10,000 Pentium Pro processors to achieve a similar performance. Even more impressive than the chip's speed is its power consumption: At 3.16 GHz, the CPU consumes 62 watts, which is less than the firm's current Core 2 Duo desktop processors and about half of the firm's 2.66 GHz quad-core Xeon X5355 processors (which are believed to provide a floating point performance of about 50-60 GFlops).

Intel claims that it can scale the voltage and clock speed of the processor to gain even more floating point performance. For example, at 5.1 GHz, the chip reaches 1.63 TFlops (2.61 Tb/s) and at 5.7 GHz the processor hits 1.81 TFlops (2.91 Tb/s). However, power consumption rises quickly as well: Intel measured 175 watts at 5.1 GHz and 265 watts at 5.7 GHz. However, considering the fact that just 202 of these 80-core processors could replicate the floating point performance of today's highest performing supercomputer, those power consumption numbers appear even more convincing: The Department of Energy's BlueGene/L system, rated at a peak performance of 367 TFlops, houses 65,536 dual core processors.