Remember Intel's prototype 80-core processor? It's now operational, baby. The company demonstrated the power of the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious processor to journalists in San Francisco last week, reports CNET News. Performance appraisal: "At 3.16GHz and with 0.95 volts applied to the processor, it can hit 1 teraflop of performance while consuming 62 watts of power." Surely, that's a lot of PS3s in one small piece of silica real estate.

The chip was designed around 65nm technology, but CNET says that if this moves to production, it should move to smaller technology to make the end product more cost-effective. As it is, this mother-of-all-Intel processors required a special motherboard and cooling system for its demo run. And this mother is apparently not alone: CNET makes reference to a 96-core chip being designed by ClearSpeed to be used as co-processors in supercomputers.

Now, how to make best use of 80 (or, heaven forbid, 96) cores? Well, for starters, most current programmers may choose to have a heart attack first. When asked, Jim McGregor, an analyst, said: "The operating system has the most control over the CPU, and it's got to change. It has to be more intelligent about breaking things up (among the cores)." EIGHTY cores?

Here's an interesting bit of trivia. Windows Vista won't run on this puppy. It doesn't use the x86 instruction set used by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in their commercial processors.