Intel's microcore future shown in pictures

AT THE ONE of numerous press briefings happening at IDF, several key figures at Intel were discussing the future of Intel and how will things develop with the changing face of computing as such.

Even though the products aren't even close to coming out the door, the company's marketing department has everything ready - and you will get bombarded with bombastic Tera-Scale Computing marchitecture campaigns.

The Tera-Scale is a nice marchitecture name for orientation on mini-cores and mini-threads, which are set to send current dual and quad-core counterparts into the oblivion.

Abel Weinrib stated that parallelism is "inevitable", and the company is now talking about removing obstacles in order to achieve maximum usability and bandwidth. We'll talk more about Tera-Scale marchitecture in follow-up articles, and just leave you with a picture of the very first mini-core effort from Intel's development team from Far East.

The experimental IA-32 mini-core is currently being run in a form of Field Programmable Grid Array, also known as FPGA.

And yes, your eyes aren't fooling you: the ASUS motherboard which Intel's Asian engineers are using is indeed old 430HX Triton chipset based one, equipped with 72-pin EDO SIMMs. The FPGA is using Socket 7 for housing four different PCBs, and everything looks as earliest stages of development.

But, the FPGA is still able to run Windows XP- even though it's working at a measly 1.91MHz (not a typo) at 97% processor load. µ