Why Intel Really Put 80-Cores On a Single Chip

A big part of the project at this early stage seems to be to provide a venue for asking anew a slew of fundamental questions about system- and network-level architecture, and in looking for answers based on the new assumption that you can put a 80 cores worth of useful hardware on a single chip.

As far as processors go, the future is questionable. Uses mentioned in the article tie to network-type processes, where instead of having six machines to accomplish various tasks, a single processor could do it all.

I’d have to question the amount of ram that would be required in that machine. Of course, by the time we see an 80-core processor being released, we will all have at least 32GB of DDR5 ram in our PCs *.

* Don’t quote me.

Source: Ars Technica