How committed is Intel to multi-core architectures?
Very. Multi-core processor capability is central to the Intel platform-centric approach. The company continues to invest in the Intel® Tera–scale Computing Research Program, an research and development effort to scale today’s multi-core process up to designs that have tens or hundreds of energy-efficient cores with teraflops of compute capability. At the Fall 2006 Intel® Developer Forum, Intel senior fellow and director of the company’s corporate technology group, Justin Rattner, announced the company had developed an 80-core processor and was continuing to work on resolving data traffic, heat and latency issues and to determine ways to these chips can run existing software and operating systems. In the marketplace, the move to threading and concurrency in software likely will be pulled along by the rapid transition to multi-core architectures.
