Intel: processors may have thousands of cores if necessary

Intel's future philosophy is to back off from power, voltage and the frequency of chips, and instead focus on new features and software to take advantage of multi cores processors.

It will be possible for Intel to provide multicores from the 10s to the 100s and even thousands if necessary. The idea is that by 2018 the process tech will be eight nanometers, using 256 billion transistors. By 2016 there will be 128 billion transistors on 11 nanometres.

These additional transistors will be utilized to take advantage of software applications. Intel said we won't get the same performance of power benefits, but there will be new types of applications and the company will bring supercomputing to the masses within the next decade by offering teraflops of performance.

More info at The Inquirer