Think that Quad-Core equipped computer you just bought is nice?  While it probably is, Intel today shared information about a 48-core experimental CPU that the company believes will “spur entirely new software applications and human-machine interfaces”.  The chip has been dubbed a “single chip cloud computer” due to the fact that each of its 48 cores are linked via a high speed on-chip network – much like the vast arrays of computer servers in today’s networking datacenters, to which the ambiguous “cloud” name has been applied and an increasing number of enterprise services and software developed.

Intel is betting that the chip, coupled with specially designed software to utilize its unique capabilities, will forever change how humans interact with and build computers – suggesting that one day computers operating with the descendants of this experimental CPU could read and interpret the most subtle of human body motions and gestures without supplemental keyboard or mouse pointer input.  With each of these experimental CPUs already having 10-20 times the number of discreet processing engines of today’s processors, it’s the ideas and software yet to be conceived of or developed that will surely change computing (and thus our lives) the most.

So would you like to try one of these 48-core chips?  While today’s software infrastructure wouldn’t do it justice, Intel is giving approximately 100 of these devices to industrial and academic researchers for further testing and development.  So continue to enjoy how ever many cores your PC has, knowing that soon, amongst all the other advances a company like Intel is making, the entire personality of personal computer will change.