Intel has demonstrated the 80-cores chip codenamed Polaris as the world's first Teraflop processor running at 3.16GHz at a mere 62W last Thursday @ ISSCC. This research CPU offers clues to where is Intel heading towards in the future; many-cores and mix cores architectures. We knew that the 32nm Westmere (Nehalem-C) will be the first CPU using this approach.

According to TGDaily, Intel revealed more details about its 80-core research CPU codenamed Polaris where 200 of these processors achieve the same floating point performance as today's most powerful supercomputer. Its 32-bit 80-core processor achieves about 16 GFlops per watt. It can scale the voltage and clock speed of the processor to gain even more floating point performance. At 5.7 GHz the processor hits 1.81 TFlops (2.91 Tb/s) at 265 watts.

However, the 80-core chip is just a research chip that will not become a product for the commercial market but technologies that are developed within its terascale project could trickle down into mainstream products. Intel indicated that, in the current environment, processor will increasingly gain from the simple addition of cores until 16 cores are reached. After that, the baseline performance of processor will benefit less from the addition of cores and other enhancements will become more important. Cache improvements will take the center stage, followed by thread scheduling and new instructions.