Announced at IDF Fall 2006, Intel's 80-core CPU was recently showcased at the annual Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.

Previously dubbed Terra-scale at public Intel events, the proper name of the 80-core CPU will be from now on known as the Intel Terraflops Research Chip. The CPU is composed of a total of 80 independent processing cores, which Intel refers to as tiles. The tiles are organized in rectangular fashion, with 8 tiles placed across and 10 down, plus the additional cache memory for each core.

The prototype design that was showcased at ISSCC reveals that each individual tile in the chip features a processing engine (PE) and a 5-port router. The router passes data and instructions to other tiles, while the processing engine, as the name indicates, processes data. To save power, each processing engine can power down independently of its router, meaning that a tile can theoretically only be used to pass data when its processing engine is not needed. The processing engine can then be turned on to process additional data on-demand. According to Intel, this CPU can achieve one teraflops performance draining just 62W of power.

In its current phase, the CPU itself uses an LGA package similar to Intel's Core 2 and Pentium 4 processors. However, the chips incorporate 1248 pins instead of 775. The additional 343 pins are used for signaling, while the rest are used for power and ground. In order to achieve one teraflops, the CPU has to be clocked at 3.16 GHz per core, using 0.95V voltages, but Intel alludes at frequencies in excess of 5.7 GHz. Clocked at 5.7 Ghz, the Terraflops Research Chip could be delivering as much as 1.81 teraflops.

The disclosed information also mentions that the 80-core chip is not based on the X86 architecture. Instead, it uses a 96-bit Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture, another architecture currently used in the Itanium server processors. A major hurdle that Intel hinted at will be moving from VLIW to X86 on its 80-core chip.

Now, don't expect to see these colossal CPUs any time soon. Intel estimates that it will take 5 - 10 years until we actually begin seeing the benefits of the Terra-scale research project.