Intel: 80 Cores or Nothing...

After dropping the MHz race, Intel decided to improve performance and power of its CPU by increasing the number of cores in the same CPU chips. So one can have lower clocked CPU but higher performance level. Today Intel unveiled a "proof-of-concept" CPU encompassing... 80 Cores. If it is not meant to be commercially available next year, it illustrates the current strategy: one can reach extreme performance level by multiplying the number of cores. This prototype CPU almost reaches TFLOPS while consuming "only" 191.79W.
Of course, doubling the number of Cores every six months will be interesting only if one can benefit from them, so applications as well as the operating system have to become natively "multicore aware". As we demonstrate it recently the 8 Core Xeon Mac Pro is faster than the previous Quad Core model when requiring heavy multitasking power.
One way to benefit from multi core CPU without having to rewrite too many codes for application developers might be the use of hardware/multithreading/core multiplexing.