A look at Intel's Tera-scale project

The prototype itself used 80 homogeneous cores. We were told it could have used any number, and they did not have to be homogeneous. The reason Intel chose 80 cores was because the design specs allowed for a certain number of transistors. And basically with the memory/logic tradeoff they had in mind, the company settled on the 80-core number because it provided enough memory and compute cores to prove the new idea works. It could have just as easily been 200 cores, 50 cores, or any other number because of the on-board communication system, Bautista said.