Remember Intel's prototype 80-core processor? It's now operational, baby. The company demonstrated the power of the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious processor to journalists in San Francisco last week, reports CNET News. Performance appraisal: "At 3.16GHz and with 0.95 volts applied to the processor, it can hit 1 teraflop of performance while consuming 62 watts of power." Surely, that's a lot of PS3s in one small piece of silica real estate.

The chip was designed around 65nm technology, but CNET says that if this moves to production, it should move to smaller technology to make the end product more cost-effective. As it is, this mother-of-all-Intel processors required a special motherboard and cooling system for its demo run. And this mother is apparently not alone: CNET makes reference to a 96-core chip being designed by ClearSpeed to be used as co-processors in supercomputers.

Now, how to make best use of 80 (or, heaven forbid, 96) cores? Well, for starters, most current programmers may choose to have a heart attack first. When asked, Jim McGregor, an analyst, said: "The operating system has the most control over the CPU, and it's got to change. It has to be more intelligent about breaking things up (among the cores)." EIGHTY cores?

Here's an interesting bit of trivia. Windows Vista won't run on this puppy. It doesn't use the x86 instruction set used by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in their commercial processors.

The silicone disc Intel CEO Paul Otellini is holding up in the picture (taken by Stephen Shankland for CNET News) redefines the term "multicore." Probably by adding the word "hardcore" before it, because it holds the prototype chips for an eighty-core processor that will perform a trillion floating-point operations per second.

In other words, it's a teraflop supercomputer in the palm of your hands.

Teraflop-in-a-chip is a dream. It usually takes a supercomputer, or a network of computers running in parallel, to achieve this kind of processing power. Each core in Intel's prototype clocks at 3.16GHz and communicates with each other through SRAM chips. This prototype was unveiled during Tuesday's Intel Developer Forum, and Intel says they hope to get it to production lines in as little as five years.

In related we-can't-push-multicore-far-enough news, Intel also announced in the same event that their new quad-core processors are ready and will soon appear in PCs, starting with the four-core Core 2 Extreme in November, followed by the Core 2 Quad early next year.

Have you ever seen some sort of weird music video that has holograms or some sort of grand future where we can talk to people and see them through holograms, but we can't touch them? It sounds a lot like virtual reality mixed in with campy sci-fi romance; that would be good if you like cheesy sci-fi, but otherwise, it has nothing to do with our world.

Or does it?

It seems Intel is trying their hand at making touchable holograms using silicon to create the 3-D objects in real space. The hologram would be made up of balls with silicon, called Catoms (claytronic atoms), which would not only allow for the object to be created, but also to be molded and altered in real-time like clay. Uses could lay anywhere from use in simple presentations, medical technology, and perhaps even 3-D mapping of the world.

Of course, it's still all sci-fi, but if Intel's working on it, then they're probably going to be plugging away in their labs to perfect the process. Until then, we'll just have to wait and see.

You guys are probably aware that lasers have the cool ability to send large amounts of data over long distances (we're talking about info exchange between cities and across oceans) because of fiber optic cables.

Well, some researchers at Intel and at the University of California are also aware of that too, and decided to create silicon-based chips that actually produce laser beams. You see, sending data through wires can sometimes take days, but if you replace the wires with laser light, your data can be transferred before you even have the chance to say, "wow."

Swell, eh? Apparently, laser-silicon chips are 100 times faster than most laser-based gadgets, and are known to be cheaper too. And how does once come up with these laser-silicon chip thingamajigs? Basically, you just sandwich your regular silicon chip between a layer of light-emitting indium phosphide and special channels that serve as light-wave guides. Easy,eh? Just like taking candy from a baby.

And it seems that there are a lot of people taking interest in this field, too. Reports say that Japanese scientists are looking into it but they're using a different chemical element in their research.

This breakthrough may lead to a new breed of leaner and meaner supercomputers with jaw-dropping-data-transfer speeds, so we're crossing our fingers that everyone in the community will give it a thumbs-up. Who knows? Maybe next time we'll get to see silicon-chips made from light saber material.