We were shocked to see Intel's 80-core CPU that was up and running at Gitex Dubai trade show. To make it more interesting, Intel was showing it off at the general public area outside of the tradeshow and we found out about it by chance.

First of all, this is not Larrabee; we’ve asked, and the engineer guarding this live demo with his life told us that this is a project that started even before Larrabee. This is a CPU of the future that features 80 small cores and this CPU can perform 1 Teraflop with these 80 cores with 78.35W and 3.13GHz clock speed.

This CPU is smart; if you don’t need that much computational power it will shut down most of its cores and downclock the CPU all the way to 780MHz, the peak Teraflops performance will drop to 0.01 and it will only need 6.45W to compute the 4tile, 4x4 matrix mult withcomm equation.

We also learned that this research CPU should be ready to market in five to seven years and that the current demo CPU was done in 65nm. This is the direction that Intel is taking; so after eight, sixteen, thirty-two and sixty-four there will be an eighty-core CPU and that should happen between the sixty-four and ninety-six core versions. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But this is the direction.

We can only hope that Intel can make the software guys find a use for eighty cores, as they are struggling to put four of them in good use. This is what it looks like and more to come soon.