Sure, that quad-core chip in the Nexus 4 looks like it should handle just about any task you throw at it, but it’s so 2012. Intel wants to bump that core count by a factor of twelve — and plans on doing it in less than ten years. 48 cores in a mobile device sounds pretty sweet, doesn’t it?
Now, presumably that means we’ll also be running mobile operating systems that are fully optimized to handle all those cores and that developers will be making sure their apps and games are tuned to take advantage, too. Otherwise, we’ll wind up in the same boat we’re in right now: loads of potential at our disposal, but never quite the jaw-dropping performance we dreamed about.
Intel already has 48-core chips on the market, but they’re unsurprisingly used in beastly supercomputers. The company has yet to bother with more than six cores in a desktop chip even though AMD has already moved on to eight cores. Presumably that means Intel doesn’t think we need more than six, and more recently four cores on a desktop right now. And this is the same Intel that offered up its first mobile processor with just a single 2GHz core.
So while you don’t need more than four cores on your desktop or one core in your phone, in five years you’ll need (or at least want) 48. That seems like a bit of a stretch, but when you look at Intel’s competitors in mobile — like Nvidia, Qualcomm, and TI — it’s been a fairly quick move from one core to four.
But hey, if the folks developing the software we use on our phones and tablets are ready for this kind of multi-core insanity in five years, then bring it on, Intel. Maybe by then I’ll need to transcode 4K video while rendering some 3D CAD drawings as I take the hoverbus to work on my Motorola Razr i48.
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