FT Chronicle

Intel has made public a first-of-its kind chip that fills 48 distinct processing cores on to a piece of silicon the size of a postage stamp.

The Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) encloses 1.3 billion transistors, the tiny on-off switches that support chip technology.

It is theorize that each processing core could run a separate operating system.

To date, common chips for desktop computers on average contain four discrete processors.

The SCC is made up of 24 “tiles” each one of which is effectively a dual-core processor which the tiles making up the chip can be divided into islands of different sizes that run at separate voltages.

The “cloud” on its name means it assembles the computing sources mostly filling several racks in a data center and a research has done saying the chip can fill up 100 cores onto a single piece of silicon.

The SCC is founded on Intel’s X86 structural design which means it can run operating systems of normal desktop computers such as Windows and Linux.

Microsoft said it had already included SCC into its progress line so it could develop it in the future.

Intel said the SCC would be made officially available during the first half of 2010. More details will be released at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco on 8 February, 2010.

Photo and news via BBC