
"The x86 revolution continues. You see more and more cores. Increased performance. But also without more power required," said Dell during his keynote yesterday, noting that the trend was to pack more and more computing power into smaller machines, creating desktop sized supercomputers.

Dell slide shown Tuesday at SC08 (Credit: Dell Computer)
Of course the jump to 80 cores won’t happen without several intermediate stages. Intel’s upcoming Larrabee graphics chip will be a multi-core processor, and Chipzilla’s Dunnington already counts six cores.
Sun Microsystem’s Rock processor has 16 cores and Intel is rumoured to be planning a 32-core system very soon indeed.