Currently, smartphone and tablet computers run on processors that have up to four cores, or brains. As powerful as today's top-of-the-line mobile electronic devices are, what do you think you could do with one operating on a 48-core chip?
That is what Intel is working on at the moment – developing a chip more powerful than what we are even using on desktop computers – and hopes to put it in the hands of consumers in the next five to 10 years, according to Computerworld.
As Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, told the news source, having that many cores could spread out the tasks each one handles at any given time, drastically improving overall computing power. Individual applications could run on their own dedicated cores, making multitasking significantly easier.
"I think the desire to move to more natural interfaces to make the interaction much more human-like is really going to drive the computational requirements," Rattner said. "Having large numbers of cores to generate very high performance levels is the most energy efficient way to deliver those performance levels."
As these and other technologies related to mobile electronics continue to forge onward, manufacturing processes must provide the foundation for their success. Innovative methods of joining dissimilar metals and the thermal management of electronics is essential for equipment power to increase while overall size scales downward.
Considering the leaps made in the last decade, it's not unreasonable to think Intel will be able to make a 48-core processor in the next 10 years. If successful, the world of computing could soon resemble that of what we see in science fiction films.