Terascale

A new 80-core processor is likely to be launched shortly by Intel. Intel researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs more than a teraflop of operations (trillions of floating point operations per second) while using less energy than a modern desktop PC chip.
Intel Corporation researchers have developed the world’s first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip not much larger than the size of a finger nail while using less electricity than most of today’s home appliances.
The chip is capable of producing one trillion floating-point operations per second, known as teraflop. That’s a level of performance that required 2,500 square feet of large computers a decade ago.
The first time Teraflops performance was achieved was in 1996, on the ASCI Red Supercomputer built by Intel for the Sandia National Laboratory. That computer took up 2,500 square feet, was powered by nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed over 500 kilowatts of electricity.
Intel’s new chip has 80 cores, or “tiles”. Each tile has a computing element and a router, allowing it to crunch data individually and transport that data to neighboring tiles. Intel used 100 million transistors on the chip, which measures 275 millimeters squared. This 80-core chip achieves a Teraflop of performance while consuming only 62 watts, which is less than many single-core processors today.

What is Terascale?
Terascale is basically defined as processing on terabytes of data on single machine requiring teraflops of power. A Terabyte is approximately 1024 GBs and a Teraflop is approximately 1000 Gigaflops.

Areas where the 80-core processor can be used
The areas where the 80-core processor can be used are as follows:

Media Creation: The first of them is personal media creation; the ability to search and archive both videos and images without tagging could create an entire new way to store and archive content.

Entertainment Field: Instead of watching a movie, perhaps a person would like to interact with and be the star of the show. He might be able to control a system using his voice and hand motions, something that is very dependent on the system performance and its ability to monitor the actions.

Health Field: Intel sees a need for hardware to show real time, realistic simulations of body systems and maybe to run a virtual health assistant application that monitors the vitals and can help elderly or disabled individuals. A person might also be able to run better and faster simulations on the effects of diet, exercise and disease on the human body.

Environment Simulations: For those interested in learning and travel, they might be able to completely immerse themselves in the environment of their choosing by allowing the CPU to surround them with sights and sounds from other areas. They might be able to learn a new language, with instant feedback from an instructor of the program.

Tele-presence and communications: People will be able to do conference with other people in far off places. Students could also setup appointments with teachers and the teacher will help a student to solve a problem. Patients can take appointments from doctors for simple check ups and monitoring.