he 48-core chip operates at about the clock speed of Atom-based chips, said Christopher Anderson, an engineer with Intel Labs. Intel's latest Atom chips are power-efficient, are targeted at netbooks and small desktops, and run at clock speeds between 1.66GHz and 1.83GHz. The 48-core processor, built on a mesh architecture, could lead to a massive performance boost when all the chips communicate with each other, Anderson said.

Adding cores to processors is considered a power-efficient way of boosting chip performance. The traditional way of boosting performance was by cranking up CPU clock speed, but that led to excessive heat dissipation and power consumption.

The 48-core processor's architecture includes improvements that cut memory and communication bottlenecks that affect current x86 chips. For faster data exchange, the chip topology organizes the cores with multiple points to receive and transfer data. Routers between cores facilitate faster data exchange and the architecture is expandable as cores are added. The 48-core chip has 24 small routers between cores, Koehl said.

Each core has on-chip buffers that can instantly exchange data in parallel across all the cores, Koehl said. Some features in the 48-core chip that may be applicable in the short term are related to power management, Koehl said. The processor draws between 25 watts and 125 watts of power, and the chip can shut down cores to reduce clock speed and power consumption.