Intel to ship 48 core processors by end June!

Intel announced that they are going to ship samples of a 48 core processor to researcher soon.Limited quantities of the processor will be sent primarily to academic institutions. The chip may not become commercially available as it is part of a research project, but features from the processor could be implemented in future chips. The chip is to operate around the 1.66 to 1.83 GHz clock range. Rather than boosting the clock speed to get higher performance, increasing number cores on a chip is a power efficient way of boosting performance. The cores are connected as a mesh on the chip.

Thus the cores have multiple points of receive and transfer data. Routers help the data exchange and there are 24 of them on chip. A core has on-chip buffers that can instantly exchange data across all the cores.

Power management features include controlling the operating frequency and changing voltage levels. You would be able to switch off processors/cores that are not needed.