Thirteen months ago, Intel showed off a prototype CPU with EIGHTY cores on the same piece of silicon. It uses about as much electricity as a traditional desktop CPU. This news.com article has some information:
Intel used 100 million transistors on the chip, which measures 275 millimeters squared. By comparison, its Core 2 Duo chip uses 291 million transistors and measures 143 millimeters squared.
The hard part of the design isn’t putting the cores on the same die. The chips have to talk with each other. Routers on the silicon die help assign computations to individual chips, and move finished computations to neighboring chips.
It’s a prototype, so the chips are very basic. It’s incompatible with Intel’s x86 platform. Writing software for a multi-core CPU is difficult, so the demonstrations are very limited. The chips need their own RAM, because external RAM modules like those used in personal computers won’t work. Wikipedia’s article on multicore processors is a good read, and the reference list is helpful.
Intel has a web page about the project, and here’s two YouTube videos with more details.











