Intel Knights Ferry has 50 cores, will make your laptop a beast

Dan Seitz Contributing Writer, Tech

Let’s talk, for a minute, about cores. You know your laptop has a “dual core” or “quad core”, but what does that mean? Essentially that you get two, or four, or eight, processors for the price of one. The processors themselves are fairly simple, but the power is, they run at the same time, so your computer does more, faster.

So you can imagine what a fifty-core processor would do. And this isn’t even intended to be an actual CPU.

intel knights ferry many core small 135x95 Intel Knights Ferry has 50 cores, will make your laptop a beastYes, this processor, which Intel debuted just today, is not designed to actually run your computer. It’s designed to be ordered around by another chip to do the heavy lifting. So, basically, if you wanted to play a modern video game while also downloading your entire music library and finishing that spreadsheet for that obnoxious guy in accounting, you could do that. Although why you’d do that last one is beyond us.

Even better, it’s designed to be incorporated into tablets and laptops, so all this blazingly fast power can be worked into consumer electronics.

So when will we see it? Not for a few years. The chip is currently being manufactured as you read this, but Intel needs to resolve issues of power supply before making it available to the general public, although governments and scientists will be able to get their hands on it before the year is out. Then there’s the question of actually writing software that will make use of a 50-core chip; that’s a lot of processing power, and on the consumer level, nobody’s really sure what you could even use that for yet.

But we’re sure they can figure out a few uses. Maybe this thing can just fill out the spreadsheets automatically.

Intel Unveils 50-core Chip [Seattle Times]

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