Intel on February 12 announced that its researchers have developed the world’s first programmable processor to deliver Teraflop (one trillion calculations per second) performance from a single, 80-core chip. The chip is a product of Intel’s Tera-scale computing research, with technical details of the Teraflops research chip set to be presented at the annual Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco.

Tera-scale performance will power new applications for education and collaboration, as well as enabling the rise of high-definition entertainment on PCs, servers and handheld devices, Intel claimed. The company added that artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games, multimedia data mining and real-time speech recognition could become everyday realities. Intel’s pointed out that its research chip achieves this same performance on a multi-core chip while consuming only 62 watts less than many single-core processors today. The research also investigated methods to power cores on and off independently, so only the ones needed to complete a task are used, thus providing more energy efficiency.