Intel working on 48-core chip for smartphones, tablets
A smartphone with 48 cores could change our concept of what it is and what it does — Intel researchers are working on a 48-core processor for smartphones and tablets but it could be five to 10 years before it hits the market.
Context & Ripple Effects
Intel has been exploring many-core designs for years, from its 80-core processor demonstration in 2007 to a 50-plus-core teraflop prototype in 2011. Its 2012 smartphone and tablet push makes the new research effort an attempt to carry that parallel-computing work into smaller devices.
The company is not alone in framing mobile computing around many cores: Adapteva has also targeted tablets and smartphones with a 64-core chip design. Intel's stated five-to-10-year timetable makes this a research-roadmap signal rather than a near-term component launch.
First-order effects
- Intel gives its smartphone and tablet effort a long-range many-core direction, while device makers evaluating its existing mobile platforms get no immediately available 48-core product.
- Adapteva and Intel become directly comparable around a shared proposition: bringing unusually high core counts to mobile devices.
Second-order effects
- Mobile-chip architects face greater pressure to show how their designs turn parallel cores into useful device performance, rather than competing only on conventional mobile processor roadmaps.
- Intel's existing phone and tablet platform work becomes strategically tied to whether the company can translate laboratory many-core research into mobile silicon.
Third-order effects
- If these research programs reach products, mobile processors may compete increasingly on parallel-processing architecture rather than incremental core-count additions alone.
- The pattern points toward smartphones and tablets becoming platforms for more computationally intensive tasks, with chip design becoming a central differentiator among device ecosystems.
The trend: Mobile computing is becoming a target for the many-core architectures previously demonstrated chiefly as research and high-performance designs.