Intel’s 80 Core Terascale Chip Explored: 4GHz clocks and more

Terascale Capable Workloads

While the prospect of having 80 cores working your home PC might sound exciting just for the sake of technology, in reality there are some very specific workloads that Intel has in mind when theorizing about technology such as this.  Running Word and Excel are surprisingly NOT among them.

There are five main categories of applications that Intel considers to be candidates for terascale application hardware.  The first of them is personal media creation; the ability to search and archive both videos and images without tagging could create an entire new way to store and archive content.  Would you like to be able to search for more pictures of someone on your PC just by selecting their face in an image up on your screen?  That could be possible, as would creating animations and videos based on such images and data.

Another area for terascale processing is in the entertainment field, but maybe not in the way you are thinking.  Instead of watching a movie, perhaps you’d like to interact with and be the star of the show.  You might be able to control a system using your voice and hand motions, something that is very dependent on the system performance and its ability to monitor your actions.  Of course, 3D and interactive devices could also benefit in a processor where we essentially would have 80 pixel pipes that can communication amongst each other.

In the health field, Intel sees a need for hardware to show real time, realistic simulations of body systems and maybe to run a virtual health assistant application that monitors your vitals and can help elderly or disabled individuals.  You might also be able to run better and faster simulations on the effects of diet, exercise and disease on the human body.

For those interested in learning and travel, you might be able to completely immerse yourself in the environment of your choosing by allow the CPU to surround you with sights and sounds from other areas.  You might be able to learn a new language, with instant feedback from an instructor program to get you on your way to that French degree.

Finally, tele-presence and communications round out the list.  Here we are talking about video and above conference with people in far off places, setup appointments with teachers and doctors for simple check ups and monitoring and maybe even to perform artistic endeavors to or with those somewhere else. 

Of these, there are three main ‘killer’ applications that Intel thinks will push terascale projects like this one.  The first is recognition: the ability to model and identify data such as a human face or finger print. 

Data mining is something that is very important to companies like Google as well as price searching engines like our own Pricegrabber service.  With processors like this in your system and on servers, you might be able to always pull up ‘related searches’ without slowing down the actions to get the results you specifically asked for. 

Finally, synthesis is the biggest of three ‘killer’ apps and involves creating and simulating real world events.  Companies that would like to see how a drug will interact with another person or a car developer that wants to test their stability and control; both of these are options for a company looking to increase parallel activity.