Chipmaker Intel has been showing off a fully programmable 48-core processor which it thinks will pave the way for massive data computers powerful enough to do more of what humans can.

The single-chip cloud computer is successor generation to the 80-core "Polaris" processor that sprang from Intel's Tera-scale research project in 2007. Armed with 1.3-billion transistors it can run standard x86 software and are basically low powered cores that gain power by collectively working together. The SCC is basically a a high-speed "mesh" network that lets each of the 48 cores communicate with others or with the four linked memory controllers. While the Tera-scale chip used something similar, the SCC uses a third of the power and is accelerated with built-in hardware instructions for minimum communication delays.

Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner believes the beast can do a lot of things. He hopes to create a machine will be capable of understanding the world around them much as humans.

“They will see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities, and will demand as a result very powerful computing capability," he claimed.

Dreams of Frankenstein's monster apart, certainly the SCC will shake up the server world. It will be possible to replace a rack of gear with one SCC. Intel plans to share 100 SCC-based systems with various partners in industry and academia.