Intel has developed an 80 core processor which can perform a trillion floating point instructions per second. Their newly available Core Duo performs about 25 GFlops instructions per second. Each core on the chip will have 256 Mb of directly bonded static RAM cache. The memory has been attached to the bottom of the processor and is the key component in providing an aggregate memory bandwidth of 1 Tb per second. According to Intel the cores on the new 3.1 GHz chip are not full CPU cores, but floating point accelerators, comparable to the to cores in the IBM Cell or Sun Microsystem's Niagara processor. The company said the prototype chip could reach the market in about five years.

Intel has been working with University of California Santa Barbara for several years on laser research. Lasers are well known for their gigantic data transmission rates as evidenced in fiber optic cables, but you couldn't put those cables on computer chips, until now. Using CMOS manufacturing techniques, Intel and UCSB etched tiny tunnels or wave guides onto chips. Then a layer of indium-phospide was stacked on top. Light is produced and travels down the wave guide when electrical current is applied to the layers. So far Intel has been able to pack 25 lasers onto thin bars and 1000 lasers onto square chips. The company said that this new technology will increase the bandwidth to 50 times over comparable electrical links and added that "hundreds of wires" were being eliminated.
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