In about five to ten years it will not be shocking to have a smartphone that would perform as well and as many functions as your PC does, as Intel is working on granting what is probably every gadget lovers dream by developing a mobile chip that would essentially have the power of a super computer and if not that, then at least a main stream computer.
Intel is currently working on a technology that will allow them to develop a mobile chip with forty eight cores, which is a giant leap from the existing mobile chips which usually have at maximum four cores; NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 has four main cores with an additional low power core. Though the process of developing such a mobile chip is expected to take anywhere between five to ten years, it is still something that users will be looking forward to.
The idea of developing a chip with multiple cores has one major intent behind it, and that is to improve speed and performance. As per Intel, adding multiple cores to a device is comparable to delegation of work; the task are divided between the different parts of the chip, making it more energy efficient, and increases the speed of the processor as well. With a 48 core processor users will be able to multitask, simply put, with much greater efficiency. The main premise behind having such a large number of cores is the delegation of specific tasks to different cores. For example, a low power core could be tasked with sending email, whereas a higher power core could simultaneously play video, while another core could stream music, or play Angry Birds. This would divide the burden between different cores, resulting in net lower battery consumption.
Though dividing tasks between cores is not a new phenomenon as NVIDIA has done so with its Tegra 3 platform which has four main operational cores and one low power fifth core which facilitates running applications which have a lower power requirement, thus allowing better processing speed as well as lower battery consumption. However, one of the main concerns with having too many cores in a processor is that most developers haven’t even begun taking advantage of two and four cores, so taking advantage of 48 cores is a long way off.
